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The issue of racism is one which has exercised the interests of large numbers of social scientists over the last century. The obvious reason for this is that actions taken on behalf of racial belief have had important impacts on various societies worldwide in the last five centuries or so. The phenomenon of racism, as we define it variously, is a relatively new phenomenon arising with the European expansion into the four corners of the globe during the last few centuries.
As mentioned above, the idea of racism has been explored, researched and discussed in great depth over the last several decades, thus a text such as Racism-A Short History would assumedly include in its pages the essential points about this important social scientific phenomenon. The author, George Fred-rickson (Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of a number of texts on the phenomenon of racism) examines the concept of racism in three sections: "Religion and the Invention of Racism," "The Rise of Modern Racism(s)-White Supremacy and anti-Semitism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," and "Climax and Retreat." In the third section Fredrickson discusses racism in the context of the twenty-first century and offers a final comprehensive analysis and definition of the concept. Fredrickson's task in the text, as he puts it, is "to present in a concise fashion the story of racism's rise and decline (although not yet, unfortunately, its fall) from the Middle Ages to the present. To achieve this, I have tried to give racism a more precise definition than mere ethnocentric dislike and distrust of the Other"(5).
Fredrickson's definition of racism is as follows: "it is when differences that might otherwise be considered ethnocultural are regarded as innate, indelible, and unchangeable that a racist attitude or ideology can be said to exist"(5). The obvious basis for this would be differences based on physical characteristics that are genetic in origin. Such markers are then used as the basis for constructing and acting on a theory of racism. According to Fredrickson again: "But racism as I conceive it is not merely an attitude or set of beliefs; it also expresses in the practices, institutions, and structures that a sense of deep difference justifies or validates.... It either directly sustains or proposes...