Racism Debate

As it is mentioned in introduction part, although racism debate is a deep-rooted one in many different disciplines such as international relations, sociology and psychology; it is still ongoing debate which is transforming into other newer types. There are numerous studies on racism that focus on biological differences like color whereas the publications are less about “new racism” which refers to “declining role of biological hierarchies as ways to establish racial difference in contemporary period” (Ergin 2017:20). Moreover, as a consequence of focusing on biological differences, most of literatures are lack of information about the role of media, education and even family life that shapes individual’s perception on racism. Besides, almost

During my literature review, I have found that regardless of time scale, nationalist-discriminative discourse is more widespread than the discourse which defends race as an artificial fact. There are studies which some of them too extremist such as eugenics or racist theories developed by Gumplowicz, Le Conte, Le Bon and Lapouge (Hawkins 1998:186-202). Even though, contemporary literature is softer than earlier ones, there are still studies which emphasize hierarchies among races. Dawkins is one of the famous contemporary contributors of discriminative discourse by referring biological differences, especially genes and ignoring other factors while classifying individuals according to them. The names and theories above, which I would like to criticize in my dissertation, establish the basis of widespread discriminative discourse. On the other hand, there are some counterpart studies which are more inclusive even though they are limited. J.J Weber argues that “Categories such as ‘black’ and ‘white’, or ‘foreign’ and ‘native’, as with all binary oppositions, are socially constructed, and the most important question is perhaps the one of power: who has the power to impose his or her categories? Who defines where the boundaries between categories lie?”(Weber 2015:56). First part of the quote corroborates my dissertation by emphasizing the feature of artificial race and second part that is questioning the power refers social classes which I am going to study on to fill the gap with field work. He continues that “the verb perceive emphasizes that national belonging and national identity is a mental and emotional matter (ibid.54). It is also for this reason that refers to nations as ‘imagined communities” (Anderson 1991). These arguments go along with the point that I have started for showing