Racism

But can a combination of religious and other cultural antipathy be described as ‘racist’? Is this not to rob the idea of racism of any analytical specificity and open the floodgates to a conceptual inflation that simply undermines the legitimacy of the idea?

Firstly, the idea of ‘race’ contains both biological and cultural elements, for example skin colour, religion, and behaviour. Secondly, the biological and cultural appear to combine in variable proportions in any definition of a racial group, depending upon the group and the historical period in question. And racial status, as in the ‘whitening’ of

In the absence of clear biological evidence, a cultural practice, commitment to Judaism, functioned as a racial marker.

But is all ‘ethnic cleansing’ racist? Or is there something distinctive about racist acts of hatred, expulsion, and violence? In which case, how exactly are we to distinguish between hostility based on ethnicity and that based on race? What is the difference between an ethnic group and a race? To put it somewhat differently, but making the same poi