What makes someone racist?

I have tried many times to get inside the minds of BNP supporters but never with great success. Perhaps it’s because they’re so tiny. I think, though, I might have one answer to the question of why on earth anyone would take their skin colour as grounds to look down on others? Just imagine for a moment that you had nothing in your life to be proud of. Your personal relationships were rancid, your professional achievements non-existent, your education laughable and your physical appearance unpleasant. Imagine, further, that everywhere you looked you saw happy, well-adjusted, fulfilled and popular people and instead of giving you a warm glow inside or a feeling of optimism it just made you angry. Bilious, bitter and ridiculous but still, inevitably, desperate to find something with which you could mask your own feelings of inadequacy and feel, in some sense, ‘special’. Then along comes a bloke who tells you that your skin colour – an attribute that has absolutely nothing to do with the things that usually draw admiration from others: effort, intelligence, warmth, attraction, education, empathy, decency, kindness etc. – is actually sufficient grounds for you to feel better than all those hateful happy people. Obviously, he will need to hide the fundamental idiocy of seeing skin colour as a substitute for genuine achievements or attributes by banging on about national pride or patriotism or indigenousness and, secure in the knowledge that his target audience will have neither the wit nor the inclination to expose the hilarity of his theories, dressing up his own race hate as something noble. So it is that sad, lonely failures everywhere will always be first to rally to a cause that seeks to cast someone – anyone – else as inferior, however absurd the criteria may be. If it didn’t lead to such horrible situations, it would be easy to feel sorry for BNP ‘supporters’. But I still wouldn’t want my child taught by one.