Racism: What It Is and How to Deal with It - Uned

A Guide to Talking about Racism | 44
Racism is a dynamic process that depends on many conditioning factors and
circumstances, both personal and social. There are no exclusive causes or
explanations for racism, because the motivations of people, groups, and institutions
are different; however, we have risked identifying a series of justifications that can
help to explain racist behavior..
“We are all tempted by racism. All of us have within us fertile ground ready to receive
and allow the seed to germinate as soon as we let our guard down.”
Albert Memmi 14
2.1 The tendency to simplify
We all function cognitively with stereotypes and we establish categories; this is a
psychological mechanism that helps us to simplify reality and to be able to function
in a more agile way in our daily lives.
“Clichés, set phrases, adhering to conventions, standardized codes of
behavior and expression fulfill the socially acknowledged function of
protecting us from reality, that is from the demands that all the events and
facts make on our thinking attention in virtue solely of their existence. If we
were always aware of this demand, we would soon be exhausted. ”
Hannah Arendt 15
Although this is the way that social cognition works, we must realize that it is also the
starting point for the racist mechanism.
The emphasis on difference and not sameness distances us from those people or
groups that we categorize as “others.” By establishing categories, we are inevitably
making value judgments that lead to a different way of considering each social group,
that is, to creating a hierarchy. This differentiation and classification can “blind” us to
trying to get to know the other. We take knowledge (either based on previous
experiences or using stereotypes about social groups) that annuls our capacity to see
who is there. We simply apply the “cliché” and go on to consider the person an
individual of class A or class B, without really getting to know them. And this lack of
knowledge makes us afraid of the other, it provokes a lack of trust and rejection on
our part; or, on the contrary, it provokes admiration and liking.
In the case of immigrants, one of the groups that is a victim of racism, we find that
there are different aspects that are valued one way or another (hierarchy), resulting –
in some cases- in discrimination: according to the IOÉ Collective 16 , the main criteria of
differentiation are the following:
14 MEMMI, A. (2000). Racism. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, pág. 23.
15ARENDT, H. (1995). De la Historia a la acción. Paidós, I.C.E. U.A.B.
16 Colectivo IOÉ. “Actitudes ante los inmigrantes: ¿discriminación o trato igualitario?”, in Revista Sal Terrae
Nº 1045, 2001, pp. 379-395. Available also at www.nodo50.org/ioe