Racist Movements

Abstract

Racist movements are organized, collective efforts to create, preserve, or extend racial hierarchies of power and privilege. Such movements explicitly espouse the ideologies of white supremacism and/or anti‐Semitism (anti‐Judaism or hatred of Muslims or Arabs) that were consolidated in the western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Manifestations of intergroup antagonism in earlier times, even conflicts that cross what later would be regarded as racial lines, generally are not considered racial movements because these are not based in modern ideas of race as an essential, biological, polarized, and unchanging attribute of social groups. Denoting as racist only social movements that take place in western societies is a common practice in sociological research, as most scholars regard white supremacism and anti‐Semitism as the legacy of ideologies by which European colonists sought to exonerate their brutal conquests and occupations. However, this restriction has been challenged by studies that use the concept racist (or racial) movements to describe subnational intergroup antagonisms in a number of non‐western societies, including China, India, Indonesia, and Russia.