Home	Contents	Search an article	Subscription	Email

Contents Opinion • Silence is the greater sin Lilian Thuram 1. Roots • Shadows in the big city Andrea Aravena Reyes • The rise and fall of the laboratory racist George M. Fredrickson 2. The excluded • Brazil: stuck at the gates of paradise Diane Kuperman • India’s hidden apartheid Gopal Guru, with Shiraz Sidhva • Côte d’Ivoire: trouble in the hospitable land Theophile Kouamouo • Fortress Europe bids you welcome Ivan Briscoe • A return to nature Interview with Alberto Burgio Colour, nation, ethnic hate… Why racism? Dossier concept and co-ordination by René Lefort and Ivan Briscoe, respectively UNESCO Courier director and journalist. “We are one” When it comes to dealing with racism, “silence is the worst attitude” says Lilian Thuram, member of France’s World Cup-winning football team. Echoing his remarks, NGOs campaigning in the run-up to the World Conference against Racism (Durban, South Africa, August 31-September 7) have insisted that the voices be heard of the hundreds of millions of people around the world who are still victims of racial discrimination. Institutional racism, the last incarnation of the myth that certain “races” are born inferior, died with the end of apartheid. Dating back to the Renaissance, nourished by religious then scientific thought, it reached its culmination with Nazism (pp. 21-23). Although the myth is flatly discredited today, its legacy lives on, as the status of blacks in South America goes to prove (pp. 24-26). Most importantly, the decline of racist ideology does not signal the end of racial discrimination, grounded, as the UN stipulates, on “race, colour, or ethnic origin.” Victims of this “veiled apartheid” are no longer discriminated against in the name of biological “inferiority,” but because of religious tradition—the lowest castes in India (pp. 27-29)—or economic and political instability, which is fuelling waves of xenophobia in black Africa (pp. 30-32). Discrimination also occurs in the name of “cultural difference,” deemed so profound that harmonious co-existence becomes impossible. Many indigenous peoples, like the Mapuche in Santiago, Chile (pp. 18-19), are in this position. So are millions of immigrants in Western Europe (pp. 33-35), where racism does not appear to be simply “spontaneous”: rather, it is intricately linked to tensions generated by globalization (pp. 36-37).