Ask the Scholars

I think yes. You can believe that race is important, that innate differences are important, without necessarily having prejudice or discrimination, but this is rare; it's theoretically possible, but it's pretty rare, I think, to have a purely intellectual belief in race without being a racist. Race is a set of beliefs without necessarily either the prejudice or the discrimination; just the intellectual belief that there are innate differences between people that don't necessarily transla...

As an individual you can be a racist, believe in race, and not act on that racism. And therefore that belief in racial difference will have minimal impact on other people, although it will have a great impact on you. But then there's this whole other thing called institutional racism, and it's the kind that no individual has to take personal responsibility for. But it can operate against people of a different race, say African Americans, in a very specific and damaging way, even though i...

I have defined race as a worldview and as an ideology of human differences predicated on the assumption of a natural inequality among human groups. "Racism" is any action or behavior that reflects this worldview.