Racism is alive and well today. It has a bright future too, because thinking is hard. Lots of people would prefer a simple wrong explanation because it's easier (to put on a bumper sticker) than a complex correct understanding because it's harder (to convey during a commercial break). Intolerance is rooted in laziness and fear, both of which are abundant and self-renewing; they are everlasting. Intolerance based on skin color is just one kind, an easy kind of intolerance. One that can be exercised at a distance.
Such rigid and simple discrimination may have been useful at one time when tribal conflict had mortal stakes, but it is completely maladaptive now. Absent knowledge of skin color, there are not many distinguishing characteristics that can be known that matter.
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Originally Posted by William Shakespeare channeling Shylock
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
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Hate begets hate. Laziness begets laziness. We share our humanity regardless of such trivialities as skin color. But we are easily distracted by what is apparent from what is important.