I think it's important to point out that there is a difference, albeit one that is glossed over by man commentators, between "stereotyping" and "racism". Racism implies a hierarchy of value between distinguishable groups and is based on a completely faulty understanding of both biology and social dynamics. If you dig a touch deeper, you will find that it is also based on Spencer's concept of "Survival of the Fittest" (yeah, that was Spencer, not Darwin) applied to a skewed, unilinear teleology.

Stereotyping on the other hand is a result of the way our brains have evolved and is a pro-survival trait. Stereotyping is the action of taking limited sensory input and reacting to it - it's not always right, but it does tend to be fast. Let me give you an example of why I say that stereotyping is "pro-survival". Imagine you are on the savanna and you see the top of one piece of grass moving against the wind. Are you going to rationally analyze it or are you going to react? If you rationally try to analyze it, you will probably end up being killed by the lion whose tail tip you mistook for a grass stem, while the other person who just ran will live to have kids.

Stereotyping may harden into racism once you start getting an inter-locking set of "rational" justifications for why the stereotypes are not only "valid" but "why" they are "true". This is a process some Sociologists call "crystallization" where perceptions "become" social "truths", and it's why so many people will say that "racism" is learned.

Let's bring this out of the lecture hall

Most people have difficulty killing other people (those that don't are usually called sociopaths). So, here's the problem - how do you get someone to kill someone else in an organized fashion, but not indiscriminately? One way to do this is to "train" them such that they will engage an opponent only when they receive certain stereotypical sensory input. In an ongoing fight, this stereotypical sensory input starts to get crystallized into names - the "muj", the "geek", the "Hun". At other times, you end up picking a stereotype that already exists in the culture and is perceived as "dangerous" and use that. Since cultural stereotypes can come from almost any medium, I'm not at all surprised to hear about the German example. Anyone played any video games recently?

Marc