Nationalism as Racism Generator

The connection of xenophobia and member-concentrated societies is in the scientific definition of xenophobia, which is the fear of everything that differs from our perceptions and prejudgments about the matter.  Being resulted from many different and connected parts in social structures based on stereotypes and prejudgments about things before they happen, racism was and is being used to apply for stereotyped judgment of people basing on their race/ ethnicity, religion, skin color, nationality, language or other personal characteristics. This refers to categorizing people on the basis of positive or negative evaluation of their membership of another group. Social physiology defines stereotyping as a process of identifying people and their ways of life with the already made perceptions about them.  Benedict Anderson tries to look at nationalism as a model of love towards one‘s nation and will to die for its freedom and identical recognition, however it affiliates with racism. The reason that connects racism with patriotism is the hatred, which is the outcome of the Herskovits’ 3rd stage of extreme negative ethnocentrism, when a group not only imposes its values to others, but also devaluates the significance and worth of the values of other groups. The specificity of racism is that it can be not only process of devaluation of another group but also an outcome.  And the easiest stage to underestimate the worth of other groups is to negatively criticize them by specificities of their biological category, as skin color, hair color, and physical construction.
Another stage of discrimination is the cultural racism, when the target is not one‘s biological category but one‘s culture. The question that rises is that whether it is more dangerous to discriminate one‘s biology or culture. Otherwise, whether it is easier to humiliate people by discriminating their biological category or their culture. The keys that should be paid attention to is that culture suppose plurality (collectivism). When looking through the definitions of the culture it is described as a system of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.  Another notion of culture defines it as collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.  These definitions refer that culture is characterized as a collectivistic system. And it is much harder to insult a collective than an individual. Moreover, cultural relativism protects culture with the idea that every culture is different than other. This also refers to the statement that the specificity of every culture depends in how much it differs from others.  

Hripsime Asatryan 

References**
Anderson Benedict, 1983, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso Edition 2006, London, New York
Herskovits, Melville, J. 1973. Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cultural Pluralism. New York: Vintage Books., p. 21, p. 103