Racism and Minority Rights: A Historical Wound and a Living Crisis

By Sarra Mamlouk

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Desmond Tutu once compressed centuries of human struggle into a single moral warning, reminding us that silence is never neutral.

Racism, in all its forms, has been one of humanity’s darkest inventions, and its impact has not faded with the end of slavery or the fall of empires. It remains stitched into laws, economies, identities, beauty standards, borders, and even languages.

To understand how deeply racism shapes the world today, we have to explore where it came from, how it evolved, and why it still thrives despite global narratives of equality and human rights.

Human societies have always noticed differences among themselves, but the idea of race as a rigid, biological hierarchy is new in historical terms. For thousands of years, people distinguished one another by tribe, region, language, or faith, not by racial categories.

Race, as we understand it, was constructed deliberately in the 16th and 17th centuries to justify the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Slavery existed before, but the scale and brutality of modern slavery demanded a stronger moral excuse. Race became that excuse, packaged as “science” and repeated until it seemed like truth.

Even early philosophers contributed to justifications without foreseeing how their ideas would be weaponized. Aristotle, while discussing natural slavery, claimed that Greeks were free by nature while “barbarians” were more inclined to servitude.

He did not refer to Africans or any specific race, but his argument planted a philosophical seed that future empires watered. Ideas have consequences, especially when read by people searching for validation rather than wisdom.

In the Arab world, ethnocentric ideas also emerged through conquest, trade, and the influence of earlier philosophies. Anti-Black prejudice intensified as the Arab slave trade grew, and by the eighth century it produced discriminatory language and literary portrayals.

Thinkers like Al-Abshibi and Ibn Khaldun described sub-Saharan Africans in dehumanizing terms that later translators exaggerated through colonial lenses, creating racist distortions that neither side originally intended. It was an early example of how racism is often manufactured through selective interpretation rather than objective truth.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, racism began wearing a lab coat. European scholars attempted to classify humanity into biological species, treating cultural differences as physical inferiority. Johann Blumenbach divided humanity into five groups, placing Caucasians at the top and describing the rest as degenerations.

Polygenists like Christoph Meiners depicted Black people as “ugly” and biologically separate, creating an ideological distance that made slavery seem natural rather than criminal. Racism disguised itself as science, which made it even more powerful.

No regime proved more lethal in racial ideology than Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler’s government constructed a racial universe where Germans were framed as the purest Aryans and therefore entitled to exterminate or enslave “inferior races.”

Jews were positioned at the bottom of this hierarchy, not simply as outsiders but as non-human. The Holocaust killed six million Jews and millions of others including Poles, Serbs, Romani people, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war. Racism, once theory, became an industrial system of murder.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that this brutal logic did not appear suddenly, but grew from decades of racial thinking that normalized imperialism, colonial genocide and the dehumanization of entire peoples. When nations learn to see others as objects, extermination becomes a policy rather than a horror.

Slavery legally ended, but racism did not. The last slave ship reached the United States in 1859, and abolition came five years later. Yet many abolitionists themselves believed in racial difference and simply disapproved of slavery as an institution. This tension shaped the 20th and 21st centuries as formerly enslaved communities fought for rights they were legally granted but socially denied.

Modern genetics has demolished biological race as a scientific idea. Humans share 99.9% of their DNA and there is more genetic variation within racial groups than between them. Race is not biological, but racism is socially and politically real. The danger is not in the differences humans notice, but in the meanings they attach.

Today, racism appears in new forms: police violence, refugee scapegoating, employment discrimination, digital harassment and algorithmic bias. In the United States, the killing of George Floyd in 2020 reignited global protests, yet many activists believe that institutional change has been slow or performative.

Economic disparities remain stark: Black Americans earn significantly less than white Americans and face major obstacles in housing and credit systems, preserving generational inequality.

Native American communities continue to face some of the highest rates of suicide, poverty, addiction and violence, a legacy rooted in genocide and forced displacement. Being recognized legally as equal has not reversed the emotional and structural trauma embedded in national identity.

In the Arab world, racism targets multiple groups, including Black Arabs, African migrants, Berbers, Kurds, Armenians and Southeast Asian workers. The Gulf region, dependent on foreign labor, has faced repeated accusations of exploitation, wage theft and human rights abuses.

In North Africa, Black citizens and immigrants face discrimination and are sometimes treated as perpetual outsiders despite centuries of shared history.

Globally, anti-Arab racism has been amplified by conflict and media narratives that portray Arabs as violent or uncivilized. Palestinian communities, in particular, have faced dehumanization that normalizes their suffering and justifies extremist violence.

Meanwhile, Sinophobia surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, where Asians faced verbal harassment, exclusion and physical assault driven by fear rather than fact.

France, despite its motto of liberty, equality and fraternity, continues to struggle with systemic discrimination against Arabs, Africans and Asian minorities. Racist language remains widespread while laws against hate speech rarely prevent social stigma or exclusion.

Solutions require layered thinking rather than simplistic moral slogans. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant proposed cosmopolitanism, arguing that humanity must learn to value difference instead of erasing it. Empathy is not naïve, it is strategic. Without it, societies create permanent enemies.

Legal and educational reforms must deepen, not just exist. Social media platforms need accountability structures that punish digital harassment rather than reward it with likes. Human rights organizations must gain independence and protection. Most importantly, schools must teach history not as propaganda but as a mirror.

Racism was invented, therefore it can be dismantled. The first step is accepting that the world is not divided by nature, but by narratives that we have the power to rewrite.

Sarra Mamlouk, law student from South Africa and Tunisia, driven by a lifelong commitment to justice and human rights.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not represent the views of Nisaba Media.