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 – which were consolidated in the western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Intergroup antagonisms in earlier times, even conflicts that cross what were later regarded as racial lines, are not generally considered racial movements because they were 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 justify their brutal conquests and occupations of the Americas and Africa. However, this restriction has been challenged by studies that use the concept of racist (or racial) movements to describe subnational intergroup antagonisms in nonwestern societies, including China, India, Indonesia, and Russia.