Why are people racist and colorist? What's your opinion.?

[Francis]

Okay, so I'm an British-Indian lad. I come from a highly Southern-Asian and Black working class area in Birmingham, but I've moved to an area that's white and middle-class for university. The people are nice, respectful and I was surprised by the amount of white women who seemed interested in me more so than women of my own race from my hometown. I'm seeing one now actually.

Curiously, I wanted to find out a bit more about inter-racial dating in a positive light. The amount of horrifying crap I've seen being exchanged left me upset. One woman claimed that white people shouldn't date Indians cos that would degrade the Caucasian gene pool and was really big on the skin colour variations of us. Some Indian dude was talking about how white people are from the Devil.

It made me think about racism in general. Personally, I was brought up in a home where we were taught to respect people for being people cos we're all human, but yo, it's really scary and worrying to think that other people have those kind of things in their head.

Why are some people racist?