re: women do not deserved to be raped
Jazz, I don't know which dictionary you're using but there are a number of perspectives: 1) The dictionary perspective, which varies according to common usage of a land. UK dics for example vary in many ways to the US ones, to Oz, NZ, Canadian, etc. 2) Moral usage which again varies according to religion, land, philosophy, class, etc 3) The scientific perspective, which will look at the anthropological aspects of race BUT The most basic, the common denominator of any word where an -ism is involved, is the root word itself, in this case, "race." So any sentence which groups a race of people as a single entity and having the one attribute (such as black hair, long ears, tall body, green eyes etc) or behaves in a singular way (religious, cultural ethics and customs, cuisine, etc) is also racist -only by the virtue that it uses a race as its core. As I said however in answer to Yak's first question, racism is not inherently morally laden. Something like "asians have black hair" is racist but not morally laden, it's simply a fact. However, if one begins to actually add moral judgement on this fact, such as, "blond, blue-eyed people are better human beings and people with black hair are terrible" then surely this is a morally laden racist remark. If you are a blonde and you say that "blondes are superior to all other people then you're being chauvinistic. In other words, praising your own group is by implication a racist or biased statement by exclusion.
Racism, then, is simply a matter of talking about a race as if that race comprises every single unit. It becomes an insult when you add morality to the attribute you give to that race.
I thought it was a simple matter to define this word but obviously those who think that all distinctions are derogatory (xenophobes) have highjacked its meaning.
