The racist is who?

A racist is a person who is convinced of the physical and intellectual superiority of some races over others and that these differences are decisive in the cultural and historical achievements of different peoples.

Racism in the Modern World

In the modern world, where the most progressive part of the community stands for democratic principles, the idea of a pluralism of opinions and views is also popular. This means that any opinion, interpretation of the historical process, political movement and other products of human thought have the right to exist and defend their positions by legal means. In the political sphere of states that declare the democratic system and power, this implies peaceful coexistence in it of parties and movements of different directions. However, it is extremely important that pluralism and tolerance can not be extended to misanthropic views. In this sense, the "racist" is an unambiguously negative definition, and people who call for discrimination against persons with a different skin color (incision of the eyes) or, even more so, to unlawful acts against them, must definitely answer before the law.

History of racism

The view that representatives of different human races are unequal in their abilities, appeared a very long time. And, actually, it was born repeatedly, as soon as representatives of various civilizations with pronounced external differences met. However, for a long time, racism was not formulated in any significant philosophy for the reasons that, firstly, there was no special domination of representatives of one race over another, and secondly, it simply did not have a need. It arose only in the era of colonialism and mass treatment by Europeans of the inhabitants of the African continent in their slaves. This practice should have been justified in the eyes of the public, and even of the slave owners themselves. First of all, this rationale was found in the Bible, in the story of the damned Noah descendants of Ham - supposedly those same Africans. The first scientist to be racist is the Frenchman Joseph Gobineau. In the middle of the 19th century this man became the founder of the scientific justification of the inequality of human races. His ideology was based on practical observations on how far the Europe of this time - economic, military, cultural and political - left the world of civilization from other continents. According to Gobineau, this was explained by the primordial advantage of the so-called Nordic race in intellectual abilities.

In general, the second half of the XIX and the first half of the XX century became a time of theoretical substantiation and flourishing of racism. In the 1860s and 1870s, after the abolition of official slavery in the United States, racism in the midst of demobilized soldiers and officers of the southern army flourishes here. The American racist appears before us in white robes and with a cap. Representatives of the Ku Klux Klan thanks to the scope of their activities have become one of the main symbols of this trend. However, the most famous representative and ideologist of the conviction about the inferiority of individual races and peoples is Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, persistent in their ignorance, modern ultrapatriots in Russia continue to use the symbols of the Nazi Party despite the fact that the Slavs belonged to the inferior Nazis. As an extremely weak counterargument, Russian racists cite excerpts from speeches of German officers flirting with local collaborators and sometimes saying what they wanted to hear. However, even after the defeat of National Socialist Germany, racism continued to live long in some parts of the world. Thus, in the South African republic of the apartheid era, a racist is not an abusive term. But apartheid existed until the 1990s.