Here is my piece I wrote some time ago and posted in different tread:
Racism exists in all races and cultures on Earth with fairly equal intensity.
Racism is not an European invention, it always existed everywhere in every group. Portuguese didn’t run around in Africa rounding up the slaves. The slave market existed in West African countries before they arrived, slaves were local commodities, local culture with long slave tradition. It’s common for one tribe to enslave people from other tribe, all around the world. If you like it or not, black people captured black people and sold them to Portuguese.
I’d say, racism has its roots in basic emotion like aggression against common enemy. It is exactly same emotion of hatred and aggression towards people of different religion or class. This even exists in all territorial mammal spices. One group of wolves chases away other group from their territory. Some can be surprised, but there are well documented records on video, of one group chimpanzees attacking other group, and killing some in process, just because the others were trespassing through their land.
The differences for group aggression can be quite subtle; like soccer fans from other part of same city, or migrant workers from other town stealing our jobs, etc. Of course, if differences between groups are more visible and obvious the easier to segregate the groups and unleash aggression.
Aggression and hatred towards different group has deep evolutionary roots. We are basically born to be racists, laugh at and ridicule others, romanticize and exaggerate our importance. All of it because these traits of behavior were very beneficial for survivor of our ancestors. It made the group more united therefore stronger against common enemy. Unfortunately the legacy of it hunts us now when we’re trying to build one big and happy global village.
Things like education of our kids in spirit of equality, tolerance, inclusivity will help us a lot. We should have same human rights, privileges, responsibility and opportunities. We should be equal under any political, social and religious laws. This will help us a lot, but the racism will never go away.
Did you notice that the fear place big role in it too? How come we are so scared of many different things, basically the things that we are not used to, and ready to ridicule? Things like: disfigured people, people of different races (if not growing up in multicultural country), people dressed up differently (old fashion), stranger knocking at your door, different sexual behavior, etc…
For me fear related to differences has strong evolutionary heritage, and obviously had positive role in our ancestor’s evolution.
Also this trait will hamper our global community, but this could be fixed to some extend through exposing our young to all world’s varieties.
Other thing that stands in the way of global village is that even if we are totally equal in rights, we never will be the same. We are not born as clean slate; we are born with programmed physical and mental abilities, characters, temperaments, and predispositions etc. that are stronger and more prevalent (statistically speaking) in one race than another. Different races are product of tens of thousand years of evolution in different geographical regions, and to some extend (most likely) intermingling with local hominid spices. Personally, I don’t like it at all, because it screws up my romantic view of harmonious global village, but my logic leads me to this explanation, that I can’t resist.
But maybe we’ll be fine, and in 1000 or10 000 years, we’ll be nicely mixed into one race and culture, and racial, religious and class hatred will be a thing of a past.