Hi, need to submit a 2000 words paper on the topic A Classification on Race Lines.

Hi, need to submit a 2000 words paper on the topic A Classification on Race Lines. Mixed-race metropolitan populations throughout the world today attest to worldwide ‘miscegenation’.

However, it cannot be denied that ‘racism’ exists. The term ‘racism’ was first used in the context of the racial superiority claims by the Nazis resulting in the Holocaust. Ruth Benedict (1942), the renowned anthropologist, believed in the reality of the concept of race, although she decried racism. ‘Racism involves social boundary demarcation and hierarchical ordering of human beings according to phenotypical difference, creating an “us” and a “them”. Racism also involves the conflation of physical difference with cultural difference, and with certain cultural characteristics’ (Dawney, 2008). The effect is the marginalization of certain members in society – forming an outgroup.

Notwithstanding the paucity of scientific evidence, racism is also defined as ‘An ideology which signifies some real or alleged biological characteristic as a criterion of other group members and which also attributes that group with other, negatively evaluated characteristics’ (Miles, 1993). Racism is often conflated with ethnocentrism. ‘While the race is seen as defining the identity of a person with innate and unalterable characteristics, ethnic identity is acquired and learned through a shared culture of language, customs and belief systems, and often a shared geography’ (Jayasinghe, 2008). However, Barker (1981) had labeled the ‘conflation of racism and nationalism’ as the “new racism”, which according to him, ‘emerged in right-wing political discourse replacing the biological racism of the colonial period’. This is linked to ideas of ‘the protection of national homogeneity with fear of contamination’ (Dawney, 2008).