The concept of racism has been a subject of scientific debate, since before the word itself was introduced in the early 20th century.
Since then, racism studies have shown that this political phenomenon has transformed itself many times, during thousands of years of human history.
Recent scholars often focus upon different representations of racism, thus speaking of several racisms (in plural) rather than on one coherent single racist discourse.
In the paper ”The Matrix of Racism: Hate as Imagined Geography”, I suggest a different theoretical approach, to view the concept of racism in singular, without losing sight of the different permutations of the manifestations of this particular ideological entity.
This is done by discussing racism as a coherent entity, forming a two-dimensional matrix, organized as racism’s imagined world geography – an imagined world map – into which different forms of racism can be placed.
Henrik Arnstad