[meri_dian]

I believe it's important to put racism and hate in their contexts. Often times people are racist or discriminatory because they fear, either for their own way of life being eroded or because they don't understand the "other".

This does not mean those attitudes are good. Far from it. But we must try to empathize with all people. Which is much easier to do when, as MLK advocated, we love all people.

[zerb]

Oh, that's another great point. There are different kinds of racism.

There's a great video from the 80s called "The Color of Fear" which has a bunch of randomly-chosen people of various ethnicities put into a room, who slowly start to talk about more and more uncomfortable subjects.

There's fear. There's lack of empathy for problems which don't affect you personally. There's even outright hate. These are different problems with different solutions.