Race and Racism

Abstract

The concept of race as a means of sorting and segregating human beings is ancient, but its modern manifestation dates to the time of European exploration and the Enlightenment, when it became an instrument of both science and geopolitics. Racialization is the process by which race is deployed through discursive acts of racism. Geographers played a significant role in the invention of the concept of race and in the development of racial science. The concept motivated the environmentalist approach that dominated the discipline by the early twentieth century, and remained a contentious topic in both human and physical geography from the 1920s onward. By the end of the twentieth century, with the advent of poststructuralist thinking, race was recognized as a social construction and, as such, one of the most powerful ways of organizing human relations. Current geographical studies of racialization emphasize changing conditions in a world of increasing globalization, urbanization, and shifting geopolitics as well as the embodiment of race.

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