If you put it like that, all humans and cultures can be racist, xenophobic and discriminatory to others who they don't like, but Indian culture is infamous for its caste system built on discriminating the other Indians of lower castes.
It's similar to how white people from developed rich countries routinely discriminate other white people from poorer less developed countries, except they have much better PR and washing on it than India's caste system which is out in the open.
It's nothing to do with skin color or ethnicity in the end, it's all to do with wealth and social status, and people are always trying to climb up the status ladder, and that usually implies bootlicking those with higher status, and kicking down the ladder on those with lower status.
If you zoom out and look at this issue more abstractly, we're still acting like those groups of apes you see on National Geographic documentaries.
That was true till 10-20 years ago or so when we had things like the Matrix and Lord of the Rings, but most of the modern entertainment content coming out of the US right now is not only low quality predictable slop but also filled with US-centric political messaging, identity politics and virtue signaling that nobody else outside the US identifies with or wants to pay for. Taht why so many bomb.
lets hope that these undesirable elements of movie making are short lived and history sees it as a glitch. I want stories, not politics for my entertainment.
Some people say it to mean that. But another perspective is that there can be racist structures which do not sit in any one individual. So you can be personally non-racist but somewhat trapped in such structures. If you go against the grain, you can risk life-and-limb (hey, Godwin!) or in a less extreme setting, socially ostracized.
To say that some quality is embedded in a culture isn’t even close to the same as saying all people originating from that culture possess that quality. The extent to which India’s (racist) caste system is embedded in its culture is hardly up for serious debate, the influence it has in India has basically been proven by science at this point.
A hypothetical claim that all Indians are racist would clearly be absurd, but it’s hardly surprising to find a group of Indians practicing something that is openly part of their native culture.
I don't think everyone is racist but I do believe that everyone has strong tribal preference. In my opinion, people feel most comfortable around those who are most like them. This is why you can look at any food market, friend group, etc. and see so few groups of people of mixed cultures. It's very natural. Racism is when you discriminate against another race/culture, even if it's just "he speaks my language, I can understand him better.."
