| I see the same thing and come to the opposite conclusion. The very fact that you can create such beliefs about people who look the exact same as you, makes it so much easier to believe that the "differences" between those with different skin colors is entirely imaginary. I don't know too much about them but in India and other places they have castes like in Japan they have Burakumin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin) and these people are shunned based on jobs their great-grandfather had. This boggled my mind and seemed alien to me until I thought about the way many English people think about the working class. If you can create Us vs. Them out of a century old vocation or people who were born in the wrong end of town then imagine how much easier it is when "they" are immediately visually identifiable, regardless of clothing, without having to hear an accent or a strange foreign name. The kids of these immigrants you talk about will no longer be immigrants after a single generation just like the italian, irish and polish kids I went to school with who I never thought of as italian, irish or polish. My family and my wife's family both come from areas that are "chavvy" but no-one would guess that by seeing us from a distance. The kids with different skin colours are a different matter entirely. (And personally I think it's tragic that it's now socially acceptable to slate people based on them being "chavs".) |
What it represents is a problem to be sure, and I do not know the right words to express it apart from poverty or disenfranchisement, but it is not racism.
Racism is believing that some races are inherently superior to others.
Discrimination because of your background is performed every single day and its ultimate incarnation is by a document we all know as a CV.