ABSTRACT
Most commonly (though wrongly), racism is understood as a variety of inter-group resentment or prejudice. The primary racism needs no inspiring or fomenting; nor does it need a theory to legitimize the elemental hatred though it can be, on occasion, deliberately beefed up and deployed as an instrument of political mobilization. Xenophobia, or more particularly ethnocentrism (both coming into their own in the age of rampant nationalism, when one of the most closely defended lines of division is argued in terms of shared history, tradition and culture), is a most common contemporary case of 'secondary racism'. If conditions allow, racism demands that the offending category ought to be removed beyond the territory occupied by the group it offends. The idea of extermination, discontinuous with the traditional heterophobia and dependent for that reason on the two implacably modern phenomena of racist theory and the medical-therapeutic syndrome, provided the first link.
