why do some people think racism is only about skin colour?

It is a good question. I am a white South African who obviously deals with the topic, in one form or another, of racism every day and I am struck by how little knowledge any black people I know have of historical anti-Jewish, Slav, Turk, Kurd, etc. racism. I get the same impression, perhaps it is false, of African Americans. They speak - casually - as if the phenomenon is naturally unique to Africans and that nobody has the right, may even dare! - to dispute their disposition on the matter because no-one else knows anything about their suffering.

Arguably the foremost African intellectual of the 20th C was Professor Ali Mazrui of Kenya. He was quite insane, strenuously and quite seriously advocating that maps of the world should all be changed to be printed upside-down (N at the bottom, and S at the top) to improve the self-esteem of African children, because that single act would make for meaningful change. (Seriously, to his choice of words. Search on Google for "BBC Reith Lectures Archive/Prof. Ali Mazrui).

But he said one interesting thing, to wit "The reality is that blacks are mistaken if they think that either the extent or degree of atrocity against blacks in colonial Africa even remotely compares to the horrors perpetrated against Jews over the exact same period of time, even excluding World War II, from Poland and the Ukraine to Lithuania and Hungary. Blacks come a distant second in suffering at the hands of racism". (I am quoting from memory, double-check the precise wording for yourself).

Various explanations have been offered for Africa's state. One wildly popular one amongst sociologists and anthropologists was that Africa had never had sufficient contact with the rest of the world because of the obstacle of the Sahara desert, for it to share and assimilate other societies' discoveries. But that was undermined by scientific proof of extensive contact over many centuries between Oman, Yemen, North Africa (i.e. the centuries of constant, consistent, unremitting, caravans of Tuareg, Berber, and Egyptian merchants), and sub-Saharan Africa. Then proof was found of contact between the Phoenicians (the Phoenicians, for pity's sake!) and sub-Saharan Africa. Then they discovered that ... etc.

One of the popular explanations nowadays, as advocated by Anver Versi, is that the world should have developed a Marshall Plan for Africa in which massive industrialisation was paid-for.... etc.

There is a terrifically-popular Zambian author, Dambisa Moyo, who blames it on the west loaning Africa money, at Africa's request. She isn't entirely wrong, but you can't have it both ways.

Bear in mind that this is all debated in the context of proof that when the western colonial powers left Africa and South East Asia - at the same time - they left many times more schools, hospitals, roads, electricity, administrative infra-structure, telephone lines, ports, railway lines, rolling stock, and clean water in Africa. The statistics are truly startling; in fact the discrepancies are difficult to believe. But there was a good reason for it: the west invested MUCH more money in African infrastructure because Africa had much more natural resources to exploit than S.E. Asia did. So, Africa got piles and S.E. Asia got next-to-nothing, unfortunately. Now, compare the respective developments of the two regions over the past sixty years. Mmm, it makes for a lot of squirming. The point, of course, which goes to the matter of skin colour, is that by THAT measure, racism against the yellow Asians was much, much, much harsher than it was against blacks.... No?

Who knows, man. Who knows...

I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

well because the white colonize them and make most of them slaves like 100 years ago

i guess

why are eastern European countries third world crap holes?

hispanic, african, and arab countries don't know how to run themselves thats why they suck

they need white people to bail them out of everything