These views can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities.

In terms of political systems (e.g. apartheid) that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices or laws, racist ideology may include associated social aspects such as nativism, xenophobia, otherness, segregation, hierarchical ranking, and supremacism.

[4] Racism is frequently described as a relatively modern concept, evolving during the European age of imperialism, transformed by capitalism,[5] and the Atlantic slave trade,[1][6] of which it was a major driving force.

In their 1978 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice (Article 1), the UN states, "All human beings belong to a single species and are descended from a common stock.

[35] In both sociology and economics, the outcomes of racist actions are often measured by the inequality in income, wealth, net worth, and access to other cultural resources (such as education), between racial groups.

Discourse analysis seeks to reveal the meaning of race and the actions of racists through careful study of the ways in which these factors of human society are described and discussed in various written and oral works.

[60][61] In relation to racism, color blindness is the disregard of racial characteristics in social interaction, for example in the rejection of affirmative action, as a way to address the results of past patterns of discrimination.

[83][84] A justification for the policy of conquest and subjugation of Native Americans emanated from the stereotyped perceptions of the indigenous people as "merciless Indian savages", as they are described in the United States Declaration of Independence.

It aimed both at debunking scientific racist theories, by popularizing modern knowledge concerning "the race question", and morally condemned racism as contrary to the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its assumption of equal rights for all.

[97] The United Nations use the definition of racial discrimination laid out in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted in 1966:[98] ... any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

In the words of David C. Rowe, "[a] racial concept, although sometimes in the guise of another name, will remain in use in biology and in other fields because scientists, as well as lay persons, are fascinated by human diversity, some of which is captured by race.

[107] Basil Davidson states in his documentary, Africa: Different but Equal, that racism, in fact, only just recently surfaced as late as the 19th century, due to the need for a justification for slavery in the Americas.

One of its main influences was the Romantic nationalist movement at the turn of the 19th century, represented by figures such as Johann Herder (1744–1803), Johan Fichte (1762–1814) in the Addresses to the German Nation (1808), Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), or also, in France, Jules Michelet (1798–1874).

[113] At the same time, Charles Maurras (1868–1952), founder of the monarchist Action française movement, theorized the "anti-France", composed of the "four confederate states of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons and foreigners" (his actual word for the latter being the pejorative métèques).

[120][121][122] Other scholars have criticized this view as based on an ahistorical conception of race,[123] and argued that such policies were aimed at repressing a religious group resistant to imperialism and conformity rather than a racialized entity.

[124][125] Bernard Lewis has also cited historians and geographers of the Middle East and North Africa region,[126] including Al-Muqaddasi, Al-Jahiz, Al-Masudi, Abu Rayhan Biruni, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Ibn Qutaybah.

[134] With the Umayyad Caliphate's conquest of Hispania, Muslim Arabs and Berbers overthrew the previous Visigothic rulers and created Al-Andalus,[135] which contributed to the Golden age of Jewish culture, and lasted for six centuries.

They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy.

Thus, he developed the theory that the French aristocrats were the descendants of foreign invaders, whom he called the "Franks", while according to him, the Third Estate constituted the autochthonous, vanquished Gallo-Romans, who were dominated by the Frankish aristocracy as a consequence of the right of conquest.

On the other hand, Marxism also seized this discourse founded on the assumption of a political struggle that provided the real engine of history and continued to act underneath the apparent peace.

Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899), is one of the more famous illustrations of the belief in the inherent superiority of the European culture over the rest of the world, though it is also thought to be a satirical appraisal of such imperialism.

I should expect that the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order-loving Chinese, living either as a semidetached dependency of China, or else in perfect freedom under their own law.

"[191] While anti-Asian racism was embedded in U.S. politics and culture in the early 20th century, Indians were also racialized for their anticolonialism, with U.S. officials, casting them as a "Hindu" menace, pushing for Western imperial expansion abroad.

Several protests and violence occurred during the struggle against apartheid, the most famous of these include the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the Soweto uprising in 1976, the Church Street bombing of 1983, and the Cape Town peace march of 1989.

[210] In November 2009, British newspaper The Guardian reported that Lou Jing, of mixed Chinese and African parentage, had emerged as the most famous talent show contestant in China and has become the subject of intense debate because of her skin color.

It has been argued that this separation of races continues to exist de facto today in different forms, such as lack of access to loans and resources or discrimination by police and other government officials.

He recognised racial differences as varieties of humanity, and emphasised the close similarities between people of all races in mental faculties, tastes, dispositions and habits, while still contrasting the culture of the "lowest savages" with European civilization.

Thus, in 1950, UNESCO declared that it had resumed: ...up again, after a lapse of fifteen years, a project that the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation has wished to carry through but that it had to abandon in deference to the appeasement policy of the pre-war period.

Applying Galton's eugenics to his theory of races, Vacher de Lapouge's "selectionism" aimed first at achieving the annihilation of trade unionists, considered to be a "degenerate"; second, creating types of man each destined to one end, in order to prevent any contestation of labour conditions.

Tooby and Cosmides hypothesized that modern people use race as a proxy (rough-and-ready indicator) for coalition membership, since a better-than-random guess about "which side" another person is on will be helpful if one does not actually know in advance.