RECENTLY OUR world has seen the signs of xenophobia in different countries. We forget that Abraham Lincoln fought against the existence of slavery. Our father of nation Mahatma Gandhi tried to abolish the discrimination based on colour of skin in South Africa. Many others like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela have campaigned against racism.
The term race, was once commonly used in physical anthropology to denote a division of humankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterise it as a distinct human type On the basis of physical traits, there are three major groups of race known as: Caucasoid (white skinned mostly settled in USA and European countries), Mongoloid (Yellow skinned and mostly settled in India and China)and Negroid (Black skinned mostly settled in USA, Africa and South America).
Today the term has little scientific standing, as older methods of differentiation, including hair form and body measurement, have given way to the comparative analysis of DNA and gene frequencies relating to such factors as blood typing, the excretion of amino acids and inherited enzyme deficiencies.
As all human populations today are extremely similar genetically, most researchers have abandoned the concept of race for the concept of the Cline, a graded series of differences occurring along a line of environmental or geographical transition. This reflects the recognition that human populations have always been in a state of change, with genes constantly flowing from one gene pool to another, only by physical or ecological boundaries. While relative isolation does preserve genetic differences and allow populations to maximally adapt to climatic and disease factors over long periods of time.
Racism is any action, practice, or belief that reflects the racial world-view, the ideology that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called "races," that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural behavioral features and that some races are innately superior to others.
Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the colonisation and empire-building activities of some western Europeans overseas, especially in the 18th century. The idea of race was invented to magnify the differences between people of European origin in the United States and those of African descent whose ancestors had been brought against their will to function as slaves in the American south. By projecting Africans and their descendants as lesser human beings, the proponents of slavery attempted to justify and maintain this system of exploitation, while portraying the United States as a stronghold and champion of human freedom, with human rights, democratic institutions, unlimited opportunities, and equality.
The contradiction between slavery and the ideology of human equality, accompanying a philosophy of human freedom and dignity, seemed to demand the dehumanisation of those enslaved. By the 19th century, racism had matured and the idea spread around the world.
The concept differs from ethnology, with the former linked to physical and therefore immutable differences among people. Ethnic identity is acquired and ethnic features are learned forms of behaviour. Race, on the other hand, is a form of identity that is perceived as innate and unalterable.
In the last five decades, many conflicts around the world were interpreted in racial terms even though their origins were in the ethnic hostilities that characterised many human societies (e.g., Arabs and Jews, English and Irish).
Racism in total, reflects an acceptance of the deepest forms and degrees of divisiveness and carries the implication that differences among groups are so great that they cannot be transcended. In a nutshell, it does not have any scientific or biological reasons of superiority, it is a man made social stigma
