How Christians Can Combat Racism.
Two Christian scholars respond to this inflammatory issue in this article, and each attempts to deconstruct what Charlottesville had resurfaced about racism in the USA. Racism is a social construct and is a pernicious worldwide phenomenon. Its expressions can be strangely subtle, and yet it can be outright raucous and violent. What is racism? Broadly, it is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. The ideology underlying racist practices often includes the idea that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different due to their social behaviour and their innate capacities as well as the idea that they can be ranked as inferior or superior. The Holocaust is a classic example of institutionalised racism which led to the death of millions of people based on race. While the concepts of race and ethnicity are considered to be separate in contemporary social science, the two terms have a long history of equivalence in both popular usage and older social science literature. “Ethnicity” is often used in a sense close to one traditionally attributed to “race”: the division of human groups based on qualities assumed to be essential or innate to the group (e.g. shared ancestry or shared behaviour). Therefore, racism and racial discrimination are often used to describe discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of whether these differences are described as racial. According to a United Nations convention on racial discrimination, there is no distinction between the terms “racial” and “ethnic” discrimination. The UN convention further concludes that superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and there is no justification for racial discrimination, anywhere, in theory or in practice. credit: Wikipedia.
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