"Racism and xenophobia are not the residues of a “past which does not want to fade away”, archaisms which survive the disappearance of the conditions which generated them. The cataclysms of the 20th century have not vaccinated us against the temptation to stigmatize, the practice of exclusion and sometimes the pleasure of hating diversity. From this point of view, contemporary xenophobia is profoundly linked to the history of racism, substratum of a modernity which has modified its morphology but not its function. So it is necessary to situate the racist fabrication of otherness in its historical context in order to understand how it perpetuates itself today."
Full: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2223