Before I actually elaborate on the subject i would like to make a point clear: Racism as we experience in 2009 is quite different than the Racism one could come across say 60 years ago. I would say that early racism was taught but modern racism is most surely learned.
There has been a change in dynamic. 60 years ago people were quite out-spoken about their views on "negro" or on"paki" and so on, nowadays people are most subtle and discreet. Racism is becoming a silent disease that is poisoning every level of our modern society. It's in our schools, government bodies, in the media, but most of us remain unaware.
Hatred has become mainstream, we found racism excuses, we give it new names. The World is learning racism.....
The Media are accountable and responsible for most it, and by extent the Internet. Our World has become totally reliant on the media on their images to shape our opinions, we make their truth ours. We have been bombarded over the last few years by images of bloodshed, violence, terrorism. Those horrors have been associated to the Middle East and Asia. We have been learning that "those people" were different from us, that their political views were a threat to us, that we needed to protect ourselves from them. Every image rooted the fear of the "other" deeper in our collective psyche.
We were learning racism. We carried that fear in our everyday life, we passed on that fear to our children who in turn learned from our behaviours that the "other" were synonym of danger.
We learned from our government that we had to use violence to prevent "them" to hurt us any further. The Western World carried that fear overseas, we carried that fear with us at home. We learned from our leaders that international law was irrelevant when it came to the enemy. We learned that the rule of law was only for the Just and not for "them". We learned that in order to ensure the survival of our ways of life we had to separate, segregate, incarcerate the ones that we decided didn't fit.
The Internet has been in many ways became the "University of Racism". Blogs have replaced pamphlets. The anonymity given by the Net has allowed people to let go of their social inhibitions and to show their true colours. Racist comments became the norm, readers became immunised, slowly they were learning that it was Ok to hate that everybody was doing it.
By learning racism we were learning to divide.