Meanings
plural neoracisms · alternative neo-racism
- uncountableDiscrimination or prejudice based on nationality and ethnicity or cultural differences.
What is new and different about neoracism is denial, including a determination to deny "the other" any voice or space in the mainstream.
2002, Kate A. Berry, Martha L. Henderson, Geographical Identities of Ethnic America: Race, Space, and Place, →ISBN2 more examples
Whereas racism is traditionally based on one's physical appearance and stereotypes associated with an individual's race, neoracism extends racism to include stereotypes about one's country of origin. Neoracism is based on the perception of superiority of cultures and national order […] According to neoracism, the racial experiences of Africans and Asians, for example, are qualitatively different from the racial experiences of their hyphenated American counterparts.
2012, Brian Pusser, Ken Kempner, Simon Marginson, Universities and the Public Sphere, →ISBNA stream of European authors differentiate between overt and individual 'classic,' biological racism and covert and institutional cultural neoracism (Fréjuté-Rakauskiené 2006: 13).
2012, Reinventing Race, Reinventing Racism, →ISBN, page 382 - countableAn instance of neoracism, or a type of neoracism that targets a particular nationality.
Stolke (1995), on the other hand, considers the characterization of contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric as a neoracism to be misleading.
2011, Christopher Lawrence, Blood and Oranges: Immigrant Labor and European Markets in Rural Greece, →ISBN2 more examples
In the France of today the tendency to 'keep the two stories separate' has, I think, very serious social and political consequences, consequences that are being played out in the rise of the various neoracisms of the 1980s and 1990s that focus on the figure of the immigrant worker.
2000, Andy Hollis, Beyond Boundaries: Textual Representations of European Identity, →ISBNAfter Race centrally holds that race is a biological myth at long last invalidated by science, but now dangerously re-created because scholars persist in using the term. Such scholars thereby decisively aid the rise of culturally based neoracisms and even the recrudescence of biological racism.
2007, Michael Yates, More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States, →ISBN, page 73 - derogatoryuncountableAn ideology that rejects the idea of color blindness and believes in different treatment for different races.
[…] opposing all forms [of] racism, including neoracism. JANET: Martin Luther King would have been super-antiracist, but CRT progressives minimize King's accomplishments.
2021, Stephen Waters, Individuals, Journalism, and Society Epilogue-Lessons learned1 more example
Bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting black communities and weakening the social fabric. We're told to read books and listen to music by people of colour but that wearing certain clothes is 'appropriation.'
2023, Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress
Origin
* neo- + racism * (ideology of different treatment for different races): 21st century.
Full word history & related roots →Rhymes & wordplay
Anagrams
Cite this entry
neoracism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/neoracism
“neoracism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/neoracism. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “neoracism,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/neoracism.
Source: neoracism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.