Racism is like being in a sports team where your team gets all the good stuff, and the other team gets all the bad stuff, just because they look different. This unfairness comes from three things:

• We think certain characteristics belong to specific races.
• We think our race is better than others.
• We use social power to disadvantage other races.

For example, imagine if all basketball players got free ice cream just because they're tall, leaving out the football players. That's like racism. It affects individuals, groups, and institutions, and can even become a 'normal' thing through socialization and media.

As young as three, kids start recognizing categories like 'boys' and 'girls' or 'black' and 'white'. Clark and Clark in 1947 showed kids a white doll and a brown doll and found that by the age of five, over 90% of them could identify the correct ethnicity of the doll. It's like knowing apples are different from bananas at a young age.

Here's where things get tricky. When we put people in categories (like basketball players or football players), we tend to like our group more and dislike the other. This leads to favoritism and discrimination, just as in Sherif’s Robber’s Cave studies and Tajfel’s research.

Today, showing racism or sexism is generally frowned upon, but sadly, it hasn't disappeared. It's just gone underground, like a sneaky mole! This is called 'Stealth Stereotyping' or 'Implicit Bias'. We may be biased without even knowing it.

Think of it like secretly cheering for your home team even though you say you're neutral.