There's fear of strangers, of outsiders who are different, and one name for that is xenophobia, and it probably goes way back, and is always liable to crop up again; but racism is something different.

It's racism when you get people living in the same place, speaking the same language and even with the same religion, and yet they see the colour of their neighbours skin as a significant kind of difference.

And that isn't something inbuilt or natural. It's a highly unatural distorted vision of humanity. And it's pretty recent in terms of human history, a few hundred yesars.

"Racism" has been developed in a few cultures, as an underpinning for slavery and colonial empires. It's even been given a pseudo-scientific rationale, which talks in terms of a few totally discrete "races", rather than in a continuous spectrum of numerous slight variations.

I think that it'll be possible to get rid of that distorted vision, and the racism, that springs from it, even if that doesn't mean there won't be antagonism when people with different ways of life rub up against each other.