Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

APPENDIX Racism in Historical Discourse
One is a belief that the differences between the ethnic
groups involved are permanent and ineradicable. If conversion
or assimilation is a real possibility, we have religious
or cultural intolerance but not racism. The second is the
social and political side of the ideology—its linkage to the
exercise of power in the name of race and the resulting
patterns of domination or exclusion. To attempt a short
formulation, we might say that racism exists when one ethnic
group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or
seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that
it believes are hereditary and unalterable.
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