Separated by a Common Language

Perhaps related: "Asian" in the UK seems to refer to people from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and so on, but doesn't seem to be used much for people from China, Korea, Japan, and so on. The opposite seems to be true in US English.

(I mean this from an anecdotal perspective, rather than an academic one; as a Brit that lived in the US for a few years, I remember being confused when I first encountered the difference, but I don't know how widespread it is.)

The KKK and their ilk are definitely still anti-Catholic: they are the descendants of the American Native Party (better known as the Know-Nothings) from before the Civil War, which was opposed to all "new" (i.e. non-WASP such as Irish, Italian, and Polish) immigration.

A group of Jews who were experiencing discrimination attempted to prove that they were a race in U.S. law (and therefore a category requiring strict scrutiny -- which almost never happens -- to pass constitutional muster) by showing that their enemies considered them a separate race. It didn't fly.

A phrase that comes up fairly often in the US, in reference to derogatory talk about various religions, is "hate speech." We also have "hate crimes," which are regular crimes compounded by some sort of (usually verbal) abuse. I'm on the fence about whether hate crime laws are a good thing -- there is something Orwellian about the whole idea -- but I wonder whether the concept gets around the difficulty that you find in British English of describing speech that is discriminatory again certain religions.

"there about three times as many Muslims as Hindus in the UK, and about 6 times as many Sikhs..."
...so there are twice as many Sikhs as Muslims? Really?

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Lynne

it's kind of surprising we don't have a widely used single word for religious discrimination, like religionism or faithism. But we don't seem to.

I think the usual word is persecution if you're on the receiving end or bigotry if you're not yourself the victim. When those words are too highly charged, people say intolerance.

Of curse, all these words have broader denotations, but in context they fit the 'religionist' bill.

And the word sectarian frequently matches the concept.

At the end of the Raj we used the term communal for conflict between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, but I think this has become a historic term.

I would be confused by the US Census. My mother was Spanish and I spoke Spanish and English as a child. I consider myself to be European but the census seems to separate Spanish people from other Europeans.

When I first started hearing people get into a flap about Polish immigrants in the UK, it was talked about as racism and I had more or less the same reaction as you: That's not about race. But since race isn't a workable scientific category when we're talking about humans, maybe extending it this way makes as much sense as thinking there's a dividing line between colors.

I have seen some evidence that the meaning of "racist" is starting to generalize a bit in American English as well. There's a YouTube channel where clips of a movie are shown while the narrator humorously points out purported flaws. Frequently he will say "that's racist" when some character or the movie itself appears to accept some stereotype, or to tolerate some kind of discrimination, but often it isn't really based on race at all. Sometimes it's nationality, or religion, or what kind of alien the character is. Of course, the effect is intended to be humorous, but I wonder if it is a vanguard of a trend.

I think maybe the piece that's missing here is the notion of "racialization". Races as we use the term today are entirely social constructs, they have nothing to do with zoological sense of the word, which means that different groups, and different *kinds* of groups, can _become_ races over time, while other distinctive attributes that define a group of people can lose salience to the point where they are deracialized. This happened in the 20th c. to Italians, Irish, and other groups of European immigrants to the United States; a century and a half ago, "white" encompassed English, Scottish, German, northern French, and Scandinavian immigrants, who were viewed as cultured and industrious, and excluded other (equally fair-skinned) people like Poles and Greeks who were regarded as "lazy" and "degenerate".

Particularly in the anti-racism activist community, there are many people on the lookout for incipient racialization of new groups, and one of the telltales is when an identifiable minority group is denigrated _as if_ it were one of the classically recognized races, particularly when the minority status is (putatively) biologically determined.

There are tribes and tribes. Many true-blue Tory parents would be upset if their son or daughter wanted to marry someone from a staunch Labour family — and similarly if the parents were Labour and the prospective son/daughter-in-law Tory. But few would speak of a mixed marriage. This, I think, is the key to distinguishing those tribal conflicts which really disturb people's sense of identity.

If you see something as a mixed marriage, you're expressing a fear that your tribe will lose some of its identity. This is, I suggest, essentially a cultural fear. Ideologies of 'pure' bloodlines may be overlaid, but I don't believe that this is the driving force in present-day prejudices — not in Britain, anyway.

There is, I suggest, an important similarity between what was called 'colour prejudice' when i was a small boy and present-day antagonism to East European immigrants. There's an empty semantic niche for a term that covers both. Cultural xenophobia would partly cover it, thought doesn't convey the sense of group destruction by interbreeding. No wonder that racism and racist are so frequently used as cover-all.

The drawback is that the essential difference between the two allows an easy defence to modern xenophobes. The old term colour prejudice was well chosen. Skin colour is a visible index of inbreeding and mixed breeding over generations. The grandchildren of, say, Polish immigrants may display no outward signs of foreign origin other than their names — which can easily be changed. Members of disadvantaged indigenous communities may feel threatened by new Polish immigrants, but not by black and brown-skinned neighbours. So they feel righteous anger when accused of 'racism'. Part of the Brexit argument was the argument that 'ordinary decent working-class people' were being victimised by the 'metropolitan elite' with this false accusation

Another group that felt falsely accused were rank-and-file officers in police forces found guilty of institutional racism. This was not an accusation that each and every officer felt classic colour prejudice, but it was perceived as such. Clearly there's a need for a term for the way that unchallenged stereotypes lead organisations to treat individuals less than fairly because of their ethnic identity. But institutional racism is heard as a personal criticism rather than one of institutional culture. As with anti-Polish xenophobia, there's a semantic niche with no better word than racism to fill it.

All in all, I think we're stuck with the term racism. The way to achieve precision is not to restrict its connotation but to qualify it with wording such as a form of racism or racist in the sense that...

Back to abuse, for me (AmE) the word (at least when referring to abuse of a person) implies some sort of physical action against a person. "Verbal abuse" is meant to contrast with regular abuse, and "verbal" is not optional when talking about it.

But "racial abuse" sounds wrong to me even if there was a physical action. In constructions like "[adjective] abuse" the adjective is usually the method of abuse (sexual abuse, verbal abuse, etc) or the degree of abuse (horrible abuse, severe abuse). Certain nouns (or maybe they act as adjectives here?) can occupy this slot as well, usually referring to either the perpetrator (boyfriend abuse) or the victim (child abuse, elder abuse), these cannot be generalized (husband abuse? sister abuse?). Obviously there are exceptions, "domestic abuse" and "workplace abuse" refer to the location of abuse, for example, but I cannot think of any acceptable examples where the adjective describes the reason for abuse, so most of the top 7 BrE examples (save 3 and 5) sound wrong to me. (and I cannot even imagine "suffering abuse" where "suffering" is an adjective in any dialect of English).

Incidentally, I don't recall ever seeing "male abuse". I had to Google it to see that it refers to abuse, usually of women, of men rather than vice versa ("female abuse" in the same sense is out there too, but even less common).

Boris

I cannot even imagine "suffering abuse" where "suffering" is an adjective in any dialect of English

Suffering is a particle. And since suffer is a transitive verb the noun abuse corresponds to its object.

Those suffering abuse means 'Those who suffer abuse'.

In my BrE abuse is just as likely — perhaps more likely — to refer to verbal abuse. Oxford Dictionaries only offers these example sentences:
‘waving his fists and hurling abuse at the driver’
‘Sometimes it will be a term of endearment, sometimes a term of abuse.’
‘There are no prizes for guessing what value he places on each: bourgeois is always a term of abuse, revolutionary almost always a term of approbation.’
‘My use of ‘Yanks’ recently triggered a barrage of criticism from readers suggesting the word was a term of abuse.’
‘Yobs have thrown eggs and stones at the new library in Brewery Street while hurling abuse at readers.’
‘Now imagine all these fans hurling abuse at you.’
‘Two weeks ago, we reported how hordes of rowdy teenagers were congregating in the library entrance hall, causing mayhem and hurling abuse at users.’
‘Monday night's meeting was dominated by members hurling abuse at the directors, including climbing on stage in an effort to shout them down.’
‘Since then, we have regularly been subjected to abuse and threats have been made to kill us.’
‘They had long used ‘star quality’ as a term of abuse.’
‘It went okay but as soon as I said I had to go he began hurling abuse at me.’
‘The incident happened at about 2.35 am when a group of drunks began hurling abuse at a handful of firefighters.’
‘We tend to forget pop itself was once a term of abuse and these worthies were as close to the cutting edge as it was possible to get.’
‘The word ‘liberal’ was confirmed as a term of abuse.’
‘If somebody's hurling abuse at you, it may be better to just walk away from the situation.’
‘These complaints were not the normal tirade of abuse and insults we receive but seemed genuine.’
‘In 1992 he was prosecuted by the council in the magistrates court after hurling abuse at a member of the public.’
‘A group of 20 teenagers went on a Halloween rampage in Hockley, smashing windows, tearing down fences and hurling abuse at homeowners.’
‘An alcoholic veterinary surgeon from Yorkshire who turned up to work drunk and hurled abuse at animal lovers will now hear his fate in the New Year.’
‘As a driver you suffer verbal abuse on a regular basis from drunks, druggies and even schoolchildren.’
‘The sight of grown men hurling abuse at someone who had voluntarily given up a Saturday morning to referee a kids match is truly disheartening for everyone involved.’

CORRECTION

Oxford Dictionaries online offers these example sentences...

ANOTHER CORRECTION

Suffering is a participle.

I am perfectly fine with the phrase "suffering abuse". It's quite common AmE. It just feels strange to refer to "suffering" as an adjective here. I guess these search results can't be perfect.

As far as those OED examples, I have to admit they sound a lot better in sentences than I would think. Some of them would still make me pause for a second once I encountered them, but not all.

I doubt any sort of sentence will make "racial abuse" etc sound like an ok construction, though.

Suffering is a participle.

Alternatively it can be a verbal noun (some would call it a gerund).

Years of suffering abuse means 'years of being one who suffers abuse'.

Boris

As far as those OED examples, I have to admit they sound a lot better in sentences than I would think.

The examples are from OUP's online popular dictionary of present-day English ± a very different animal from the OED, which shows the history of a word — insofar as the evidence allows.

What the OED shows is that all the earliest uses of abuse were variations on 'improper use'. It's only in the sixteenth century that it came to apply to speech. The OED definition reads

5. Contemptuous or insulting language; reviling, scurrility. Formerly also: a verbal insult.

The COUNTABLE insult sense is seen in the second-earliest (1616) but most eloquent quote from Shakespeare:

Harke how the villaine would close now, after his treasonable abuses .

This COUNTABLE sense persisted until the late eighteenth century, when it a acquired the abstract sense which is uppermost in the minds of many BrE speakers. Again, the second-earliest quote (1807) is the most eloquent

Unlimited abuse of private characters is another characteristic of the American press.

The sense of abuse in a physical sense came later — first in the sense of sexual violence, then more generally but in legalistic language. What you see as the standard present-day AmE use emerges in non-legal prose in 1791:

The constant ill usage and violent abuse of horses.

I pressed Publish too soon. What I'd omitted was definition of sense 6b from the OED:

Physical or mental maltreatment; the inflicting of physical or emotional harm or damage.

For Boris, this is the prime meaning of abuse. For men, the prime meaning is 5.

Since Lynne first started the thread, I've been struggling with how religious prejudice squares with the idea of racism.

And I'm not alone. John Cowan reports an unsuccessful effort of a Jewish group to establish the status in law of race for Jews. There have been similar attempts in Britain to have Muslims recognised as being covered by the Race Relations Act.

Both antisemitism and islamophobia differ from other forms of prejudice in that they ostensibly stem from perceived fear of actions by certain individuals in the alien group. In one mindset, the danger comes in everyday life from unscrupulous Jewish businessmen, and in the political sphere by fabulously wealthy Jewish financiers. In a comparable mindset, the danger comes from the omnipresence of Muslim fanatics dedicated to destroy Western civilisation.

I almost persuaded myself that neither antisemitism nor islamophobia should be classified as racism. But then I realised that they both involve the fear of support for individuals by the wider Jewish and Muslim communities.

Few people believe that each and every Muslim is a potential terrorist, but distressingly many believe that all Muslims are potential supporters of terrorists. Few believe that a Jewish woman or child presents a financial or political threat, but all too many believe that they lend family support to those that do.

Outside the Arab world, there's scant belief in the old myth of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, but among some left-wingers the conspiracy has been re-imagined as an alliance between Jewish money, capitalism and imperialism, culminating in the creation of the State of Israel. It follows that any Jewish people who show any sympathy for Israel are complicit in the Zionist conspiracy. The Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has allowed himself to be identified with these zealots. He tries to dissociate himself from the vitriol and from the most extreme positions. And he's convinced that he can't possibly be antisemitic because he's passionately anti-racist.

The trouble is that when he declares himself agains 'antisemitism and all other forms of racism', he fails to see the important difference between prejudice directed at the clearly weak and prejudice directed at those perceived to be strong. But he persists in defending himself against the charge that nobody is making — the change of racism.

The other British politician accused of some form of racism is Boris Johnson. While arguing against proposals for a legal ban on islamic face veils in public, he made a remark on the appearance of one such form that some Muslims have found offensive. As I see it, the only valid charge to be laid is that he should have known that his worlds would cause needless offence, and so he shouldn't have written them. This may well be a serious charge, but I can't see how it amounts to racism.

As a UK-to-US immigrant, I found the various conceptions of "race" here very hard to understand at first. It started to make sense when someone told me that "being of X race" means, effectively, "racist people will discriminate against you as an X".

VP, I think that's a wonderfully concise explanation of it, and explains why it varies from both place to place and from time period to time period, even in the same location.

Going back to some of the original discussion of race as opposed to what I would call ethnicity, and the use of the word racial in this context, I am reminded of the news stories about the French woman who was subjected to verbal abuse on a bus in Australia a number of years ago. The Australian news services called it a racist attack, specifically "Melbourne racist bus attack victim speaks out" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/22/racist-bus-attack-victim-australia) and "Melbourne man jailed over 'misogynist, racist' tirade against French tourist" (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-20/melbourne-man-jailed-over-racist-bus-tirade-against-french-tour/5334106). This led me originally, as an American, to assume she was a black Frenchwoman. But when you actually see pictures of her, she is what I would take to be white (this being one of the only articles I can currently find with a photo of her: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4035288/Man-abused-French-woman-Melbourne-bus-prison-mode-abused-drugs-cope-shame-rant-went-viral.html). The conflict developed because she and her friends were singing in French, and part of it included "speak English!" While admittedly there is a secondary discussion to be had about others misidentifying people based on looks who self-identify as part of a racial group, and therefore this woman herself may self-identify as part of a racial minority, on the surface this attack seemed to be much more based on her nationality and use of a foreign language than on the color of her skin. As an American, I would certainly call it an attack motivated by prejudice and hatred of foreigners, but racial isn't the adjective I'd use because that implies something else. I'm not sure what terms I would use, but Nativist and Jingoistic come to mind.

The OED Third Edition has thoughtful entries for racial and race

racial
2. Of, relating to, comprising, or characteristic of, a (particular) race or ethnic group.
Since the mid 20th cent. – and particularly since the advent of ideas of multiculturalism – social and cultural factors have played an increasing role in concepts of racial identity. Membership of a racial group is often considered to involve such factors as shared history, cultural traditions and language, a shared religion, and a common geographic origin or descent (cf. quot. 2007). However, while this wider meaning is common in usage of racial, the term race is often avoided in such contexts (cf. race n.6 1).

[The 2007 quote referred to is from a work called Racism: Very Short Introduction:
In a landmark ruling [in the House of Lords in 1983], it was deemed that Sikhs were a racial group because they had a long shared history; cultural traditions of their own; a common geographical origin (or descent from a small number of common ancestors); a common language; a common literature; a common religion; and they were a minority or a majority within a larger community.]

The reference to race n.6.1 is to the entry for race as referring to a group of people with a common descent. The earliest uses applied to lineage rather than classification. The word sense they we worry about seems to have taken over in the eighteenth century

race n 6
1. d. According to various more or less formal attempted systems of classification: any of the (putative) major groupings of mankind, usually defined in terms of distinct physical features or shared ethnicity, and sometimes (more controversially) considered to encompass common biological or genetic characteristics.

In smaller print they continue

In early use usually applied to groups of people with obviously distinct physical characteristics such as skin colour, etc. An influential early system was that of J. F. Blumenbach De Generis Humani Varietati Nativa (1775), which, on the basis of skin colour and conformation of the head, divided the human species into five races, the American, Caucasian, Ethiopian, Malay, and Mongolian, and assigned them qualitative ranking. A similar division into six was proposed by Goldsmith (cf. quot. 1774). In particular contexts (e.g. former European colonies or areas of the United States) adherents of a theory of race have frequently applied only a simple two-term distinction (such as ‘black’ and ‘white’).

[The reference to the 1774 quote reads
The second great variety, in the human species, seems to be that of the Tartar race.]
 
Now often used more generally to denote groups of different cultural or ethnic origin (esp. as forming part of a larger national community), in which context it frequently overlaps with, and can be difficult to distinguish from, senses 1b   and 1c; examples have been placed at this sense where distinct physical features play an important role in how race is conceptualized. In recent years, the associations of race with the ideologies and theories that grew out of the work of 19th-cent. anthropologists and physiologists have led to the word often being avoided with reference to specific ethnic groups. Although it is still used in general contexts, it is now often replaced by terms such as people(s), community, etc.

[The other senses referred to are
1b more or less the same as nation
1c (roughly) groups sharing a continent
Sense 1b is an old sense that never went away — hence Dark Star's anecdote about the French tourist insulted in Melbourne,]

It is proposed that race be more specific, by giving examples, in the US 2020 Census.

Here in Britain the BBC is currently serialising a reading of a new novel Middle England, much of it about Brexit. It's described as a satire, but I'm not laughing, and it's directed me back to the semantics of this thread.

Digesting the 'satire', I've come to conclude that in Britain (or at least in England) the term racism is applied to various composite products of more basic prejudices.

The foundation prejudice which waxes and wanes but never goes away entirely is a form of xenophobia which says Here is best and Incomers are a threat. The prejudice can be localised and petty, even quaint, but is easily turned nasty by increases in incomers and increases in locations. Beyond a critical point, people who are not at all affected by incomers can be persuaded that they are a threat.

Worse, the basic xenophobia may interact with other prejudices — not necessarily the same prejudices at the same times.

1. When the incomers share an identity with individuals who resort to terrorism, British people are apt to turn against everyone with that identity. And when individuals bring there terror to Britain, then the prejudice is intensified. This happened more than once with the Irish and is currently happening with Muslims.

2. When the incomers were Jewish, it tied in with a prejudice that Jewish businessmen were cheating on a small scale — and on a larger scale conspiring to rule the world.

3. When the incomers were from former colonies and with black brown or yellow skin colour, it tied in with the colour prejudice that had allowed us to carve out our empire — and even to engage in in slavery — with a clear conscience.

In recent years Britain has seen a large influx of incomers to whom we can attach no prejudice stronger than that basic xenophobia Here is best and Incomers are a threat. It's not as if these were from countries that we might remember as old enemies — such as the French or the Germans. (Though, as the novel point out, it's possible to represent the EC as being run by hostile Germany.)

• Clearly xenophobia + colour prejudice can be called racism

• Arguably xenophobia + antisemitism may be called racism as Jews may be seen as a 'racial' group.

• Xenophobia + islamophobia is not in principle directed at a 'racial' group

• Xenophobia + fear of terror-sympathy is a better explanation of most forms of islamophobia — along with periodic anti-Irish panic

• Xenophobia directed at East European of working age may be just as intense and just as irrational as all of the above.

So, in a loose use of the term racism is xenophobia directed at a specific group. the forms are different when you analyse them, but they feel the same.

I can see that this may sound strange to Americans. People there may direct racism there may be at people whose ancestors were brought there by their ancestors. Our eighteenth-century slaves were sent abroad or freed. Yes, we had colour prejudice (especially in our colonies), but we didn't feel the need for words like racism or racist until we were aware of nation-wide antagonism between indigenous and immigrant groups.

Does the UK use the word "colourist" when discussing racism? We would not use that word in the US, but heard it on a UK podcast.