Amos, while it's important for individuals to recognize and work on eradicating their personal racism and ethnocentrism, I believe that it's important to recognize the existence of institutional racism.

One defintion of institutional racism is "the embeddedness of racially discriminatory practices in the institutions, laws, and agreed upon values and practices of a society." Another definition is Those forces, social arrangements, institutions, structures, policies, precedents and systems of social relations that operate to deprive certain racially identified categories equality".

I would also add ethnocentrism, religious-isms, and homophobia, to that statement about how societies as systems seek to maintain power by socializing people to fear and hate the "other".

I don't think that individuals can eradicate institutionalized "otherisms" by themselves, particularly since those "otherwisms" are centuries old and are so deeply embedded in societies.

For instance, most of Western societies' fear of dark skinned people is intricately tied in, if not originating with, early Christianity. How do people work through that kind of socialization if they don't even know it's there?