Abordări şi conceptualizări ale rasismului contemporan
Approaches and Conceptualizations of the Contemporary Racism

Summary/Abstract: The present paper approaches the problematic of contemporary racism, which is further on a theme of major interest in human and social sciences. The focus is put on the present conceptualizations of racism in sociology and on theoretical approaches in this respect. Different meanings of ‘racism’ are delimited, from the narrow to extensive definitions, and the concepts of ‘cultural/ differential racism’ and ‘institutional racism’ are examined in-depth. The research questions deal with the relationship between the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘racism’, with the role of the processes of essentialization, reductionsm and absolutization in the racist thinking, as well as with the dilemma regarding the essence of the cultural racism: is it a different phenomenon, or another manifestation of the same ‘biological/ classical racism’? Furthermore, aspects about a change of the racism paradigm, which emerged along with the new conceptualization of the contemporary racism, namely ‘institutional racism’, are brought into discussion.

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