Is there a difference between racism and racial discrimination?

Racial discrimination implies some sort of act. Racism is a belief.

Well said @MyNewtBoobs .
Racial discrimination is acting upon your racist beliefs whereas many racists are able to appear normal, fair and unbiased even although they believe themselves superior race.

Racism sounds like, what has been stated, a belief system.

Racial discrimination is an act likely illegal.

I think racial discrimination is the preferential treatment of one race over another for any reason (often but not always racism), whereas racism is the belief that one race is inherently superior to others.

@Hobbes I guess that includes self-segregation for whatever reason such as choosing to be with “one’s own kind”

I don’t think their is a difference

Racism is the belief that each race has inherent properties.
This could be totally benign, however incorrect the idea may be.

For example, you may consider East Africans to exhibit greater athletic skill than many other “races”, or you may consider East Asians to demonstrate greater general skill in mathematics, or you may consider the white Europeans to be the greatest architects the world has seen. You might think Aboriginal Australians are genetically predisposed to be greater survivalists in the bush environment, or that Italians are more likely to be great cooks…

To whatever extent these opinions, and the beliefs upon which they are based, could be seen as “correct” or “incorrect”, there is no inherent malignancy. There is no harm coming from these beliefs, even if they are incorrect (although it may be a good idea to generally discourage them).

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In the context of the US, particularly, however, ‘racism’ generally actually means ‘racially discriminant’.

Racial discrimination is a belief that people should be treated differently, based upon the inherent “properties” of their “race”. To discriminate means to differentiate, to separate, to distinguish between. Now this is where we begin to enter the realms of idiocy or malignancy.

The fact is, even if there were differences in predisposition or the average state of a person, with regards to one “property” (whatever it may be: survivalism, creativity, IQ, intuition, cuisine, music, engineering, strength, speed, height, metabolism, etc.), between the “races”, the difference is so small, and the populations are so large, that, as distribution is across a gaussian curve anyway, all the people between the “races” have potential to be at either extreme, with the majority somewhere in the middle.

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This simultaneously makes race utterly irrelevant when comparing two individuals’ “properties”, and also not meaningful when comparing two “races”.

It’s makes no sense saying “the greatest person in the world at ‘this’ is such-and-such race” or “such-and-such race is better on average at ‘this’ than the others”, because no matter how true that may be, the vast majority of all people are merely average, and that average is pretty much the same for everyone.

I’ve met many people who hold such beliefs, but they don’t use them to justify treating others as superior/inferior to each other, they just have simple minds, and do not realise the non-existence/statistical insignificance of the differences in “properties” of each “race”. Slotting people into categories is just how they deal with the world around them.

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So, racism I would consider to be ‘incorrect’ or at least ‘useless’, whereas racial discrimination I would consider ‘wrong’ or ‘malignant’.

I think there are many, many racists in the world, but most of them don’t wish anyone any harm.