The term racism was coined and first used positively by fascists in the 1930s

Evidence

“Racism” is a word that came into general usage only in the 1930s. It was at first a positive term launched by fascists to describe the importance they assigned to race, and then became the central term to express intellectual critiques of fascism. Magnus Hirschfeld’s still remarkable antifascist book Racism (1938) marked the turning point, according to Robert Miles (1989:42). Race was affected by the vicinity to racism. In scholarly language, after World War II “race” slowly began to be displaced by “ethnicity” so that Irish-Americans, for example, did not remain a “race” but became an “ethnic group” (a term that enjoyed wider circulation than “ethnicity”). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 696

Categorization

• QUESTION: The fact that ‘racism’ originally had a positive, fascist sense before being inverted into a critique term is striking — worth chasing the full reception history of Hirschfeld’s 1938 book.
• SEED: A genealogy-of-terms essay: how ‘racism’ and ‘ethnicity’ both flipped valence in the 1930s-40s, mirroring how moral-panic and other loaded words reverse polarity.
• SHARE: Send to a linguist or historian-of-ideas: the antisemitic term ‘racism’ itself was initially a fascist self-description before becoming the central antifascist critique word.
• XREF: connects to: The word racism only entered general usage in the 1930s — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 696