is constructed to serve specific ends at particular times. There was, for example, an era in the US when "Irish" was considered a "race" though that time seems to have passed now
A "scientific" assessment of an idea should consider the uses to which the idea can be put. So the notion of aboriginal Americans as savages, who could not be "civilized," was "useful" in justifying wholesale slaughter and land-theft. Similarly in the South after the Civil War, the notion that "blacks" were congenitally criminal was "useful" in justifying regular arrests for "offenses" such as vagrancy with long sentences and rental of the "criminals" as chain-gang labor to companies for road-construction or coal mining and to farmers as field-hands. As the rationalizing ideology becomes socially entrenched, it becomes ever harder to question, and the critics of the ideology become marginalized automatically: finally the rationalizing ideology reproduces itself almost effortlessly
In reality, there has never been one single "racism" but many. All function to perpetuate the status quo by encouraging sloppy thinking, not based on material facts, and by perpetuating artificial divisions, making common action more difficult
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