[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by Toy Santa

But then it's not even necessarily related to country... ghettoisation is a huge problem, and these areas develop their own unique cultural differences that have little or nothing at all to do with country of origin of the residents or their ancestors (or skin colour, for that matter). For example (and at the risk of stereotyping a little) you have black communities in which there might be one or two white or asian etc. kids but usually they will be accepted by that community as "belonging there, one of the community" if that's where they were born and raised. Likewise, a middle-class black family living in a predominantly "well-off-white" area will usually be easily accepted as belonging there... even by those who are generally fearful / xenophobic towards "the other" black people. In effect they'll consider them "basically white people" and skin colour is irrelevant.

In that sense I would go as far as to say that ALL racism / xenophobia and stereotyping is entirely cultural... it just seems to be about genetics because, in general, people of one culture will have (mostly) the same physical appearance.

Yeah i guess you're right, I suppose I was thinking in a broader sense because for example when we were in the States just recently we met lot of black and white people there and I don't know if they all consider themselves alike but they were sure as hell more similar to each other than either of them were similar to us as white Irish people