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.

Concept of Race

Categorization of humans according to physical or racial characteristics appear among very early human societies.Prehistoric cave paintings in various parts of the world and decorations on ancient Egyptian tombs refer to people of different racial origin.