What is Racism

Racism is generally defined as actions, practices, or beliefs that consider the human species to be divided into races with shared traits, abilities, or qualities, such as personality, intellect, morality, or other cultural behavioral characteristics, and especially the belief that races can be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to others, or that members of different races should be treated differently.

The exact definition of racism is controversial both because there is little scholarly agreement about the meaning of the concept "race", and because there is also little agreement about what does and doesn't constitute discrimination. Critics argue that the term is applied differentially, with a focus on such prejudices by whites, and defining mere observations of racial differences as racism. Some definitions would have it that any assumption that a person's behavior would be influenced by their racial categorization is racist, regardless of whether the action is intentionally harmful or pejorative. Other definitions only include consciously malignant forms of discrimination. Among the questions about how to define racism are the question of whether to include forms of discrimination that are unintentional, such as making assumptions about preferences or abilities of others based on racial stereotypes, whether to include symbolic or institutionalized forms of discrimination such as the circulation of ethnic stereotypes through the media, and whether to include the socio-political dynamics of social stratification that sometimes have a racial component. Some definitions of racism also include discriminatory behaviors and beliefs based on cultural, national, ethnic, caste, or religious stereotypes.

Racism and racial discrimination are often used to describe discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of whether these differences are described as racial. According to the United Nations convention, there is no distinction between the terms racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination, and superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and that there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere.

In history, racism was a driving force behind the transatlantic slave trade, and behind states based on racial segregation such as the US in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and South Africa under apartheid. Practices and ideologies of racism are universally condemned by the United Nations in the Declaration of Human Rights. It has also been a major part of the political and ideological underpinning of genocides such as The Holocaust, but also in colonial contexts such as the rubber booms in South America and the Congo, and in the European conquest of the Americas and colonization of Africa, Asia and Australia.


Racism in Indonesia

As a result, racial violence has become a common phenomenon in Indonesia. Unlike the United States or South Africa, where racism is based on skin colour, racism in Indonesia manifests itself through discrimination based on ethnicity and religion. This has given rise to human rights violations in the social, economic, political, legal and cultural spheres of society. In 1998 women of Chinese descend were targeted for rape, the rest of the ethnic Chinese community for assault, looting, and murder. Such atrocities occurred in major cities such as Medan, Makassar, Jakarta and Solo. Racial riots occurred also between the Dayaks, Malays and Madura in Kalimantan in 1997. More recently in Maluku, mass-killings occurred between civilians belonging to two different religious groups. On a smaller scale, anti-Christian violence also occurred in Mataram and anti-Chinese riots in Pekalongan.

The May 1998 Riots of Indonesia were incidents of mass violence that occurred throughout Indonesia, mainly in Medan (4–8 May), Jakarta (12–15 May), and Solo, and eventually led to the resignation of President Suharto and the fall of the new order government. (13–15 May). The riots were triggered by economic problems including food shortages and mass unemployment.

Indonesia also has a racism in the society. It is just one of dozen examples for racism in Indonesia. Perhaps that in the future, people and the society in Indonesia will learn something about those incidents to become a good society and no more racism in Indonesia.