Racism develops from elemental antipathy through theorized levels

Evidence

The ‘primary racism’ is in his view universal. It is a natural reaction to the presence of an unknown stranger, to any form of human life that is foreign and puzzling. Invariably, the first response to strangeness is antipathy, which more often than not leads to aggressiveness. Universally goes hand-in-hand with spontaneity. The primary racism needs no inspiring or fomenting; nor does it need a theory to legitimize the elemental hatred – though it can be, on occasion, deliberately beefed up and deployed as an instrument of political mobilization. At such a time it can be lifted to another level of complexity and turn into a ‘secondary’ (or rationalized) racism. This transformation happens when a theory is supplied (and internalized) that provides logical foundations for resentment. The repelling Other is represented as ill-willed or ‘objectively’ harmful – in either case threatening to the well-being of the resenting group. … Finally, the ‘tertiary’, or mystifactory, racism, which presupposes the two ‘lower’ levels, is distinguished by the deployment of a quasi-biological argument. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 185

Categorization

• DEFINE: Presents Taguieff’s three-level schema of racism, a reusable analytical ladder for mapping levels of Islamophobic discourse from grassroots antipathy to rationalized political ideology to biological mystification.
• XREF: Taguieff’s levels map onto the reader’s Scaffolding Theory toolkit as a way to grade any exclusionary discourse, including Islamophobia, by sophistication. — connects to: Doctrines of civilizational decay are intimately connected with race-thinking; Racism shows natural affinity with anti-modern emotions — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 181; Racialization recruits deep psychic structures of feeling, not only beliefs — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1241 (+1 more)

Related

• Racism shows natural affinity with anti-modern emotions (similarity 0.84)
• Racism is usually wrongly folded into a general category of prejudice (similarity 0.81)
• Racism’s universality rests on instinctive fear of the unknown from species history. (similarity 0.80)
• Racism is defined by its practice, not by intensity or rationalization (similarity 0.80)
• Doctrines of civilizational decay are intimately connected with race-thinking (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Racism shows natural affinity with anti-modern emotions #corroborates (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 181