Word of the Day
racist
Racist
English
Modern English/ˈreɪsɪst/German (Rassismus)/ˈʁasɪsmʊs/
“Coined to name and discredit a doctrine, it outlived the science it attacked.”
The English word racist appears in print by 1932, in political writing against fascist ideology. The noun racism was coined around the same time by European scholars trying to name and discredit theories that ranked human populations by supposed biological hierarchy. Both words arrived late: the legal and economic systems they would eventually describe had operated for centuries without needing a precise term for their underlying logic.
5 stops · from Italian city-states to New York, USA