Concepts of Race and Racism

African-American writer and activist W.E.B. Du Bois saw at the dawn of the last century racism’s bloody climax, the culmination of a 200-year history in which Europeans ordered and ranked humankind through the mechanism of ‘race’ . The idea of ‘race’ had been created over two centuries within science and philosophy to justify the supremacy of white Europeans. For Du Bois, the problem of the colour line not only included the experience of African-Americans who had been enslaved as chattel property and segregated by Jim Crow laws; it also included European forms of colonial domination and dispossession. Furthermore, it provided the mechanism through which to persecute Jews and gypsies Europe’s internal ‘others’  and a means to justify the Third Reich’s Final Solution.

The sex–gender distinction

All societies recognize bodily sexed difference and organize their societies according to what these differences mean. By making distinctions, and thus creating categories, social order or structure is constructed. Through creating categories, the meanings of female and male are made and thereby lived. It is via this process that individuals come to know who they are in terms of self-understanding and the understanding and perception of others. 

This position in language is one aspect of what is termed social structure or social order. These terms include language and its use; architecture and the built environment; and institutions and their settings (schools, government, religions and their organizations, marriage and laws). Gender identity is ‘learned and achieved at the interactional level, reified at the cultural level, and institutionally enforced via the family, law, religion, politics, economy, medicine, and the media.

Sociologists generally make a distinction between sex – the biological differences between men and women – and gender – the learned differences. They argue that we are not born masculine or feminine, but rather acquire and learn to embody distinct gender attributes through processes of early socialization. Children in most cultures come to learn the expectations, patterns of behaviour, identification and biography associated with being a boy or a girl in their particular social, cultural or religious context.  

Gender is not simply a question of embodied style; it also concerns attitudes and ideas about what men and women essentially are or should be.


Children, too, are the social-cultural agents of gender normalization at an early age, as they begin to police and repress within themselves, and in each other, inclusive gender characteristics and identifications.