Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

by Harriet A. Washington

is also important to trace the tangled distinctions between racism and racialism. Racists believe in an innate, usually immutable inferiority, but racialist is a confusing label, because it is applied to people holding very different beliefs. The term can denote a person who believes that race or skin color does signal inherent attributes but that the attributes in question are simply different, neither negative nor inferior.24 But racialist can also mean a person who interprets the different features and qualities of blacks as superior. The word racialist has recently been used to describe actions taken to redress long-standing racial wrongs, such as affirmative action to bolster the fortunes of blacks. Then again, racialist can also be a mere synonym for racist, as it long was used in England and has been adopted by racial hatred groups as a euphemism for racism.25