It makes little sense to tell the Negrophobe in the South that in terms of biological science there is no such thing as a Negro race. Prejudices are rationalizations and institutionalizations of the underlying ‘central myth’ upon which the self-interpretation of the group is founded. We had better courageously face the fact that prejudices are themselves elements of the interpretation of the social world and even one of the mainsprings that make it tick. As such a process of “negative socialization,” racism, however, influences the embodied self-conception of the oppressor, who finds himself compelled to adhere to some kind of invisible norm such as, e.g., “whiteness.” My major thesis is that racism works via both inter-kinaesthetically as well as symbolically inflicted distortions of the victim’s body schema. After suggesting phenomenology’s potential to tackle the question of racism, I will focus on the experiential oppressiveness of racism, i.e., the ways in which it affects its victims’ lived experiences, in transforming their habitual ways of life and, finally, their subjectivities. rather, that it is, in its extraordinary negativity, a socially constitutive phenomenon per se. In other words, I suspect that racism does not only indicate a lack of integration, solidarity, responsibility, recognition, etc. ![]() Its main task is, ultimately, to show that racism as a process of “negative socialization” does not amount to a contingent deficiency that simply disappears under the conditions of a fully integrated society. This paper addresses racism from a phenomenological viewpoint.
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