This chapter approaches racism first as a historical phenomenon and then discusses how racism has been understood in social theory. Scientific racism or 'racial science', which divides human beings into races in accordance with alleged biological differences and places the white race at the top of the hierarchy, it may be shown that it is deeply rooted in the rational scientific paradigm and moral philosophy of the modern West. Then the chapter explains about the present world and suggests how racism functions today and how it may be analysed. Acts of racism and processes of racialization generate inequalities and hierarchies of super-ordination and subordination. Finally the chapter offers a synthetic perspective on racism, racist discourse and processes of racialization as a changing yet persistent social dynamic and proposes a possible synthesis that explains the different components of the discourse of racism and the process of racialization and at the same time clarifies their wider social, political and economic ramifications.