 The term "racism" is a noun describing the state of being racist, i.e., subscribing to the belief that the human population can or should be classified into races with differential abilities and dispositions, which in turn may motivate a political ideology in which rights and privileges are differentially distributed based on racial categories.The origin of the root word "race" is not clear.Linguists generally agree that it came to the English language from Middle French, but there is no such agreement on how it generally came into Latin-based languages.