A racist is a person who is convinced of the physical and mental superiority of some races over others and that these differences are decisive in the cultural and historical achievements of various peoples.
Racism in the modern world
In the modern world, where the most progressive part of the community stands for democratic principles, the idea of pluralism of opinions and views is also popular. This means that any opinion, interpretation of the historical process, political movement and other products of human thought have the right to exist and defend their own positions in legal ways. In the political sphere of states declaring the democratic nature of the system and power, this implies the peaceful coexistence of parties and movements of various directions in it. However, it is extremely important that pluralism and tolerance cannot in any way be extended to misanthropic views. In this sense, “racist” is an unambiguously negative definition, and people who call for discrimination against people with a different skin color (eye shape) or even more illegal actions against them should definitely answer before the law.
History of racism
The opinion that representatives of different human races are unequal in their abilities,appeared a very long time ago. And, in fact, it was born more than once, as soon as representatives of various civilizations with pronounced external differences met. However, for a long time racism did not take shape in any significant philosophy for the reasons that, firstly, there was no special dominance of representatives of one race over another, and secondly, there was simply no need for it. It arose only in the era of colonialism and the mass conversion by Europeans of the inhabitants of the African continent into their slaves. Such a practice had to be justified in the eyes of the public, and the slave owners themselves. First of all, this justification was found in the Bible, in the story of the descendants of Ham cursed by Noah - supposedly those same Africans. The first racist from science is the Frenchman Joseph Gobineau. This man, back in the middle of the 19th century, became the founder of the scientific justification for the inequality of human races. His ideology was based on practical observations about how far Europe of that time - economic, military, cultural and political - had gone in its development from the civilizations of other continents. According to Gobineau, this was due to the original advantage of the so-called Nordic race in intellectual abilities.
In general, the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century were the time of the theoretical substantiation and flourishing of racism. In the 1860s and 1870s, after the abolition of official slavery in the United States, racism flourished here among the demobilized soldiers and officers of the southern army. American racist appears before us in whiterobes and caps. Representatives of the Ku Klux Klan, thanks to the scope of their activities, have become one of the main symbols of this trend. However, the most famous representative and ideologist of the belief about the inferiority of individual races and peoples is Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, modern ultra-patriots in Russia, stubborn in their ignorance, continue to use the symbols of the NSDAP, despite the fact that the Nazis also considered the Slavic race to be inferior. As an extremely weak counterargument, Russian racists cite excerpts from the speeches of German officers flirting with local collaborators and sometimes saying what they wanted to hear. However, even after the defeat of National Socialist Germany, racism continued to flourish for a long time in some parts of the world. So, in the Republic of South Africa during the apartheid era, racist is not at all a dirty word. But apartheid existed until the 1990s.