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Sectarianism will always exist. One can argue that the resurgence in white supremacy here is a manifestation of that (a group of Europeans and their descendants thinking their sect is superior / innately worthy of more resources).

I think one would be hard pressed to defend the argument that racism is a "white export" but what is undeniably true is that colonial Europeans were obsessed with race and saw the world through the lens of a race based caste system.

They assumed that all human progress could be distilled to lighter skin people being more advanced and darker skin people being more primitive.

They created entire scientific fields around this and interpreted their religion in a way to support this.

In India, they interpreted indigineous systems of social hierarchy such as caste and took them a step further, defining those that were darker skinned and lower caste as inherently criminal, keeping them under the watchful eye of their surveillance state.

They perceived lighter skin Muslims and upper caste Hindus as more "civilized" than darker skin low caste Hindus and gave the former administrative opportunities because of this perceived superiority.

They had an explicit policy of divide and conquer, promoting hateful and divisive rhetoric that resulted in communal violence so that people would be distracted from fighting against them.

Then when Nazi Germany destroyed their infrastructure in WW2 such that they could no longer financially maintain their institutions of colonialism, they drew an arbitrary border which cut through incredibly culturally and linguistically diverse communities and left.

In summary: Would there be animosity between Pakistan and India without the mismanagement of partition and the empire going out of its way to promote hate? Probably.

Would racism and sectarian violence not exist in the absence of the European world view being spread globally through colonialism? No we would still have that.

Were these made substantially worse by colonial powers promoting those divisions around the world over centuries? I think absolutely yes.

So while I take your point that such divisions didn't originate in the West, it very much was a core component of their worldview and they stoked and exacerbated those divisions everywhere they went. I find it difficult to let colonists off the hook for that.

But to your general point on human nature, I agree. The reason why I hold America toa different standard is it calls itself the land of oppurunity and takes pride in that.

Human nature is a copout. Humans have removed themselves so far from nature that it isn't even relevant anymore.

Its totally natural to fear humans that look significantly different than anyone you are familiar with. That's believable as a basic survival instinct.

But that isn't the world people are born in. We aren't born hundreds of miles away from people who look radically different...often times we are born with them in the same room.

The problem is cultural and, as a result, inherited. In the modern world, racism is a learned behavior.

Then it reciprocates, and then becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy.

People suck, yea, but I'm done believing racism is human nature. That's racist conditioning. Its taking a believable factoid like "humans naturally fear people who look different" because yeah, it makes sense, from a survival standpoint, in a world where your breeding pool was separated by an impenetrable mountain for thousands of years. It doesn't make sense now.