Racialism (racial categorization)

Racialism is the belief that the human species is naturally divided into races, ostensibly distinct biological categories, without considering variable values among the races. Most dictionaries define the term racialism as synonymous with racism.

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois said that racialism is the philosophical position that races existed, and that collective differences existed among such categories, the races. That racism required advancing the argument that one race is superior to other races of human beings. In my Father’s House (1992), Kwame Anthony Appiah summarized Du Bois’s philosophical stance that racialism is value-neutral term and that racism is a value-charged term.

Today, some anthropologists and geneticists point to studies that suggest racialist beliefs are both compatible and incompatible with modern population genetics.

According to Oxford Dictionaries Online, racialism is "another term for racism". The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines racialism as "a theory that race determines human traits and capacities" and also gives "racism" as a synonym.

Richard T. Ford claimed that although "there is no necessary correspondence between the ascribed identity of race and one's culture or personal sense of self" and "group difference is not intrinsic to members of social groups but rather contingent o[n] the social practices of group identification", the social practices of identity politics may coerce individuals into the "compulsory" enactment of "prewritten racial scripts".

According to Yasuko Takezawa, there needs to be anticipation of various potential social and ethical problems associated with population descriptors when studying the genetic differences between populations.

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