If prejudice describes attitudes and opinions, discrimination refers to actual behaviour towards another group or individual. Discrimination can be seen in activities that disqualify members of one group from opportunities open to others. Although prejudice is often the basis of discrimination, the two may exist separately. People may have prejudiced attitudes that they do not act on. Equally important, discrimination does not necessarily derive directly from prejudice. Prejudiced attitudes influence discrimination.

Racism

The concept of race is fundamental to the existence of racism – prejudice based on socially significant physical distinctions. A racist is someone who believes that some individuals are superior or inferior to others on the basis of racialized differences. Racism is commonly thought of as behaviour or attitudes held by certain individuals or groups. An individual may profess racist beliefs or may join in with a group, such as a Hindutva supremacist organization, which promotes a racist agenda. Yet many have argued that racism is more than simply the ideas held by a small number of bigoted individuals. Rather, racism is embedded in the very structure and operation of society. The idea of institutional racism suggests that racism pervades all of society’s structures in a systematic manner. According to this view, institutions such as the police, the health service and the educational system all promote policies that favour certain groups while discriminating against others.

From ‘Old Racism’ to ‘New Racism’

Just as the concept of biological race has been discredited, old style ‘biological’ racism based on differences in physical traits is rarely openly expressed in society today. The end to legalized segregation in the United States and the collapse of apartheid in South Africa were important turning points in the rejection of ‘biological racism’. In both of these cases racist attitudes were proclaimed by directly associating physical traits with biological inferiority. Such blatantly racist ideas are rarely heard today, except in the cases of violent hate crimes or the platforms of certain extremist groups. But this is not to say that racist attitudes have disappeared from modern societies. Rather, as some scholars argue, they have been replaced by a more sophisticated new racism (or cultural racism) which uses the idea of cultural differences to exclude certain groups (Barker 1981).

Those who argue that a ‘new racism’ has emerged claim that cultural arguments are now deployed instead of biological ones in order to discriminate against certain segments of the population. According to this view, hierarchies and superiority and inferiority are constructed according to the values of the majority culture. Those groups that stand apart from the majority can become marginalized or vilified for their refusal to assimilate. It is alleged that ‘new racism’ has a clear political dimension. The fact that racism is increasingly exercised on cultural rather than biological grounds has led some scholars to suggest that we live in an age of ‘multiple racisms’, where discrimination is experienced differently across segments of the population (Modood, et al. 1997).