Should racism be looked as an ongoing dilemma

or should racism be stopped?

Racism refers to the belief that certain groups, based on their race, ethnicity, or color, possess characteristics that are in some way inferior or superior to those of other groups or otherwise entitle them to special burdens or benefits. Racism is closely related to other concepts: bigotry, the hatred or loathing of certain groups on the basis of racism; prejudice or stereotyping, the assignment of qualities to individual members of a group based on racial generalizations; and discrimination, the differing treatment of groups or individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity, or color (Washington, 91).

Racism is antithetical to individualism, in which people are judged on the basis of individual attributes without regard to race, ethnicity, or color. The philosopher Ayn Rand states,

Racism is the lowest most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social, or political significance to a man's genetic lineage—the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of his ancestors (Thernstrom, 97).

Racism has manifested itself in myriad ways, such as Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews and glorify the “Aryan race” in Nazi Germany, tribal genocide in Africa, oppression of the Indians in the Americas, the “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Bosnia, Jim Crow laws in the United States, and the massacres of Chinese and Korean people by the Japanese Empire, to name only a few from a depressingly long list of examples (Steele, 90).

Historians have traced back the origins of the term race to the sixteenth century when it was used as a general category similar to kind, type, sort, or breed. It was in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries that it came to refer to the social categories of American Indians, blacks, and whites, and to signify “a new ideology about human differences and a new way of structuring society that had not existed before in human history” (Smedley and Smedley 2005: 20).

Later in the nineteenth century, various thinkers, who were influenced by the theoretical advances in zoology and biology, used race to classify the varieties of human populations on grounds of racial descent and physical appearance. They also attempted to link racial attributes to moral and cultural traits of populations, while demonstrating the racial superiority of white groups. In addition, their attempts aimed at conferring scientific respectability on the ideology of race, which provided justification for the institution of slavery and rationalized the violence and harm that the European colonization of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Americas inflicted on the peoples of these continents (Sniderman, 93).

The move from race to ethnicity was assisted by social scientists who, despite their many disagreements on how to conceptualize race, generally agreed that it often reflected phenotypical differences (Rand, 89). These differences, in contrast to what ...