Ask the Scholars

The Irish-English conflict comes near to being racial because the British were beginning to believe that the Irish were inherently incapable of being civilized. That is a fundamentally extreme sense of ethnocentrism, just as the Hutu Tutsi example is. The latter was turned into a racial conflict by European colonists who interpreted this conflict as racial when it wasn't at all. We have to make a distinction between extreme ethnocentrism and racism. Racism involves a sense of biological ...

I would say there's a fine line between ethnocentrism of an extreme form and racism, because at a certain point, culture is assumed to be unchangeable. In other words, these people have a particular culture; they're not going to change it. There's no possibility they will change it, therefore they're inherently other. In other words, they're different.

Sometimes it's very hard to draw the line. For example, in studying German anti-Semitism, you see a movement from a very strong c...

I agree with that. At some point extreme ethnocentrism that is not countered by something else can become racism.

That's the point we're making. If culture becomes essentialized to the point where you really think it's going to determine people's fate, there isn't really opportunity to change it, or you don't do anything to change it, or you don't recognize its role, then it becomes at least functionally racist.