The article focuses on the question of today’s role of racism and racist discrimination, and attempts to discuss the relationship between ideology and act (deed) in cases of individual and collective violent deeds. The main question is whether racism represents above all an ideology, and if so, what kind of ideology this is and to which end it serves. Is racism in the first place an ideology of hatred that changes ideas and words into deeds, into violence, i.e. is racism above all an ideological blueprint for violence that emerges from hatred? On the basis of the thesis on neoracisms as cultural racisms, the article first drafts the contemporary understanding of racism as racism without the race. The second part is dedicated to the analysis of racist ideological features that emerged in the preparation of collective violence in cases of former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and to the question how those experiences could help understand today’s role of racism(s). The main observation is that violence did not emerge from the ideological/racist constructions of (elusive) enemies, but that racist constructions represented complex constructs of inequality that served as buffers against (political) responsibility. In the contemporary global world, such constructs above all justify racist institutions and deeds. In the conclusion, the EU anti-racist policy, which focuses on racist ideology like hate speech and hate crime and leaves the inconvenient questions of systematic structural racism of EU laws and institutions aside, is questioned.
