Balibar Theory Of Racism Research Paper

Racism is not a problem of the modern world or any particular period and is not against any specific ethnicity. It has existed for thousands of years, and several nations were its victims during different times. According to Howard (2002), the history of racism begins with Herodotus, as he traveled the world and saw different nations and their cultures. Later, in his environmental theory, Herodotus claimed that nature affects people both physically and characteristically. According to him, nations, who lives in different parts of the world were hit by the environment of the region, where they lived for a long time. Although Herodotus might be right about environment’s role on people’s physical appearance, in my opinion, it does not affect the

In Balibar’s (1988) opinion, racism had three forms: anti-Semitism, colonialism, and racism against black population in the USA, as Räthzel (2002, p. 12) states. Despite the fact that racism had a lot of forms, Balibar’s theory is still arguable. We can improve this argument by changing the order of the factors and making it more relevant for today by mentioning the problem of immigrants. Additionally, different types of racism such as cultural racism and differential racism emerged during the 1980s in Britain and France. Räthzel states that according to Martin Baker (1981), racism in Britain was based on cultures which were unassimilable and different, and for this reason, it was called cultural racism. Also, she argues that in France, the concept of differential racism has emerged while new generations of migrants claimed that they have the right to be different and maintain their culture and values. It made people stand up against them stating that in order to preserve their culture, people from different cultures have to stay in their respective places, and France also have the right to be different and maintain its values. It is obvious that these two types of racism were created against immigrants, and their supporters demanded immigrants to assimilate to their culture. We can see that

I support the arguments of Van Leuwen (2007), as he states that racism, according to Sartre, “must be seen not as an “opinion,” but as a passion” (p. 294). He claims that the racism is a view for emotional comfort, as a person tries to blame others for a particular problem, rather than thinking about it and trying to generate a solution. Also, a racist person experiences emotional ease and relief because the problem is created by others, as the author