Its not just the Nigerian fiasco, our whole approach to racism is flawed. By “Our” I mean the entire humanity and not just India. First of all we must accept the fact that being a racist is in our genes. We still have that pre-historic animal instinct to protect, propagate and favor our own kind (people who look like us, talk like us and behave like us). The proof of this can be found in the fact that most extreme and frequent forms of racist incidents occurs when some of our basic needs are challenged like security, livelihood, reproduction etc.

But as we evolved into a more intelligent being we found out that we can be more productive if we form an alliance and stop fighting each other. So today’s mostly racism-free world is a result of an economic need rather than that of a virtuous need. But children and even adults all over the world are taught that racism is not a “Good” thing and that its a vice. They are never made to understand what are the benefits of a racism-free world and problems we are going to face if we go back to our racist days. Remember “good”, “bad”, “virtue” and “vice” all are very subjective and change dramatically with place, time and people.

Globalization has changed the way we used to interact with other countries and other races. The enticement of getting a pie of the global economy is far stronger than the fear of a nuclear attack. The Apartheid was not abolished because of the threat of an immediate military strike but because of alienation from the global economy. Same is happening to Iran’s nuclear program.

Imagine a deeply racist world where the Africans won’t allow their mineral, coal and energy reserves to feed the world’s energy needs, the Americans and the Europeans won’t share their technologies with the rest of the world and the Asians stop doing mass productions of software and hardware. Unfortunately it is very hard to think along these lines if they are not taught from childhood and what we get is a knee-jerk reaction (which is basically the animal instinct taking over) and results in labeling an entire community or race as “Cancers.” So its basically a fight between our genetic animal instincts and our more evolved grey cells. If we want our grey cells to win then we must give them their only source of nourishment i.e. reasoning/logic. Hence, instead of telling people to blindly follow anti-racist laws we must tell them why they should do so.