ities amongst people are in large measure genetically determined. But how do human societies move from an acknowledgment of such a simple and politically neutral facts to cultural practices that incorporate racist ideas on every level? How do people go from noticing that one person is tall and blond and another short and dark skinned to assuming that one of these two kinds of people is better and more important? Outlaw (in Goldberg, 1990, p. 58) describes the distinction between these two kinds of conceptualizations of race this way: Race is on the one hand ôa vehicle for notions deployed in the organization of [human social] worlds in our encounters with persons who are significantly different from us particularly in terms of physical featuresö. It is also a way to describe those people who are different with respect to language, behavior, ideas and other cultural attributes. In other words, some people look different. And some act differently. And the ones who act differently also tend to look different. It is in this connection that lie the seeds of racism and such national policies as the colonization of other lands at the expense of the indigenes (Outlaw, in Goldberg, 1990, pp. 58-9).
Although it is possible that some people dislike others simply because of the way they look, this can hardly be a sufficiently common reaction to explain the widespread prevalence of racism. However, it is clear that people distrust and dislike other cultural practices, and because people who act differently from the members of oneÆs own society often look different as well, feelings of dislike become associated with physical characteristics. Thus even when two groups of people become assimilated to each other, they may still feel an antagonism that seems to be based in physical differences but in fact echoes (possibly now extinct) social and cultural differences. Moreover, it has often proven an easy jump between a dislike of other peopleÆs cu...