Talk:racialism

The definition used here should be merged into the definition for racism. The given definition is the true meaning of racism despite the fact that it is seldom used in that context. Racialism and racialist are not real words.

Requests for deletion - kept
Kept. See archived discussion of 10 2007. 20:05, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes. It's correct, but Oxford Dictionary on Google doesn't seem to understand it.
It's mentioned everything on the main page. I just elaborated on it (and the cultural issues had to be merged). People don't reject their bias easily.

RFV discussion: March 2021
Rfv-sense: "The categorization of humans in different races (not necessarily for superiority ranking)." A can of worms quite frankly. --Robbie SWE (talk) 18:01, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Compare also the definitions which were present before (vs after) these changes. (The "British, dated" label got moved to an entirely different sense, but this was probably correct, because there are contemporary and American instances of "racialism" where what's meant is "racism".) As you say, a can of worms. The entry needs more attention than I have time to give it right now. - -sche (discuss) 03:58, 5 March 2021 (UTC)


 * made a distinction between his uses of the terms racism and racialism in his 1993 book In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Racialism is “the view ... that there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race.” I do not know if he was the first to give such a clear definition, but many authors that use the term cite his book. As defined, it does not imply a notion of superiority of one race over another. A similar distinction that, however, implies such a notion was made by Bulgarian-French philosopher in the 1993 book On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought. (This is a translation from of Nous et les autres: La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine from 1989.) Todorov explains racialism as the belief in typological essences, called “races”, which can be rated hierarchically, while racism is not a belief but the use of racialism to promote social or political ends. This distinction is also used and cited in the literature. Used in this sense, it is a synonym of the oxymoronic term “” – not overtly racist, but nevertheless serving to promote a racist agenda. I think we see a less charged – although opprobrious – use here, in the sentence “Yet such racialism was built upon the data of philology, inferring discrete racial groups from different speech varieties.” This is in the context of a Victorian mediaevalist view of mediaeval English as pure and indigenous.  --Lambiam 14:47, 5 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I have formatted your links into quotations, so this can be considered cited. Kiwima (talk) 22:09, 11 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I have attempted to give a better definition. Is the rfv-sense tag still needed? --Lambiam 14:44, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
 * We usually let a word sit with its citations for a week before removing the tag. Kiwima (talk) 02:19, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 19:04, 19 March 2021 (UTC)