>"Racism is an ideology that elevates the social construction of racial
>difference to a primary place in human relations, and assumes a hierarchy.
>It was developed to claim superiority of White people over people of color
>based on the false idea that race is a fixed and immutable essentialist
>reality. Racism + discrimination + power/privilege = racial oppression. The
>overwhelmingly hegemonic form of racism in the U.S. is White supremacy, but
>other forms exist in other countries. Racism can exist anecdotally in
>oppressed groups, sometimes as a backlash response to the oppression."
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Me:
One of the things you notice right off the bat about racial animosity in Russia is the extent to which it is a reaction to the loss of the overarching loss of the sense of Soviet identity (I'm coathoring a piece on this, he says, plugging himself). The post-Stalin USSR tried real hard to depict minorities in a positive light; for instance, until recently, most Russians thought Caucasians were happy-go-lucky bomhemian hedonists, because that's how they were depicted in Soviet media (unlike the Caucasian shuttle traders you meet in today's Moscow markets). Russia has a big problem with sorting out what it means to be a Russian citizen rather than an ethnic Russian, now that the sense of "we are all Soviet citizens" is gone.