Racism & Anti-Racist Practice

Race was a term used to describe a human being of being different in physical features and ancestry features. In other words they are of different human species with differences biologically. Usually black people are portrayed as naturally inferior to white people characterized by notions of white supremacy (Dommielli 1997). Racism is when one person of a particular race discriminates against another person of a different race, however that used to be the terminology based on mistaken science that we had biological differences as human species. Terminology has moved on to be ethnicity rather than race, which are used in similar ways to differentiate people. Ethnicity describes and gives identities by differences in groups of people by skin colour, beliefs, culture and language (Fenton 1999).

According to Skellington (2011) we still do live in a racist society he provides evidence and various researches that show that there were 61,262 racial attacks in England/Wales in 2006/07. The U.K Home office statistics show there has been a 7% decline in racist incidents from 2009 to 2011, which can be politically biased, or perhaps people have become less racist. However the tolerance towards ethnic minorities was reported to far below European averages (Skellington 2010; Home Office 2011).

The Stephen Lawrence incident report proved that there was institutional racism at the top level in police forces, failure of leadership by senior officers and incompetence of professionals. McPherson (1998) in his enquiry found that institutional racism could be seen in the attitudes, processes, prejudices, ignorance and racist stereotyping of ethnic minorities that discriminates and disadvantages them. McPherson (1998) uses words like unwitting prejudice, which suggests that racism is deep rooted within all people. (Macpherson 1999).
I experienced racism in school during my junior years to high school, there were constant bullying based on the colour of our skin, the school