Edit: downvoting this without a response is pretty much against the guidelines, I am hardly distracting from the conversation here, and the downvote is not a "disagree" button. I put in a lot of effort to showing you why you have a shallow understanding of the topic; I'm open to being wrong.
Xenophobia and racism are completely separate concepts, although xenophobia does underly racism. It's entirely possible to construct a form of race that relies on other qualitative factors than skin color—just look at colourism, which ironically explicitly lays out non-color qualitative identifiers of "dark and light skinned"—hair type, body shape, hyperpigmentation, prevalence of certain genetic disease, whatever. These terms arose from feedback loops where racist capital dictate societal beauty standards and cultural norms. You certainly can't explain phenomena like skin bleaching or the long history of hair straitening with simple xenophobia. But, colourism is just one effect globalized racist capital has produced.
When academics talk about how racism is a problem, they definitely aren't discussing a general form of qualitative, personal discrimination. These racial structures underly our communities, our politics, our identities, here in America our state's use of slave labor in prisons, how our wealth is divided among our citizens, how we construct and discuss trade deals and foreign "charities" such as the Gates foundation, etc. simply put, you cannot discuss racism without discussing how race is embedded in the structures and processes all around us. These dynamics are easier to ignore in ethnically homogenous societies... unless of course you are a minority or immigrant.
Whiteness and blackness as we know it here in America were invented to formalize the structures of slavery here between the 15th and 18th centuries—this took centuries to move from the enslavement and sale of both Africans and indigenous Americans to a codified racial hierarchy, driven by European capital and nearly complete genocide of the indigenous people. I am sure there are similar narratives in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in South Africa, in Brazil, in European involvement in Southeast Asia, in virtually every part of the carribean and West Indies—it's colonialism, baby!
Every single aspect of the development of racism was ultimately driven by European capital. When countries "decolonialized" the west simply replaced formal state oppression with oppression through trade deals and proxy wars, which could not take course without European capital and violence. Make no mistake, European wealth is racist blood money.
This attitude of "oh the form of racism I learned about on Mister Roger's Neighborhood is just xenophobia with a different name" is just completely ignorant of the past 150-200 years of analysis of race and racism. I recommend these books if you have any serious inclination of discussing race:
* "Black Reconstruction" and "the souls of black folk", by WEB du Bois.
* "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern" by J. Sakai
* Toni Morrison's "the origin of others" directly addresses your attitude towards racism—after all, though racism is distinct from xenophobia, xenophobia is necessary for racism.
* "Color Stories: Black Woman and Colorism in the 21st century (intersections of race, ethnicity, and culture)" by JeffriAnne Wilder.
* "redefining race: Asian american panethnicity and shifting ethnic boundaries" by Dina Okamato.
* "Marxism and the National and Colonial Question" by Joseph Stalin. Note, I am not a Stalin fan, but he's a decent essayist and laid out an excellent argument for separating the concepts of state sovereignty and nationhood, which is basically a collective recognition of being part of a shared people. You see this in the "union" part of the soviet union and the 56 nations of China, though this is frequently disingenuously translated as "ethnic groups".
* building off the above book, "The Nine Nations of North America" is a must read. This was written by Joel Garreau.
* "Racial ideas and the impact of imperialism in Europe": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1084877980857986...
* "the color complex: the politics of skin color in a new millennium." by Kathy Russell
This is also neglecting vast swathes of racial dynamics across central and South America, Asia, Australia and Polynesia—you really can fill up entire libraries with how racism is distinct (materially, culturally, subjectively) from xenophobia and manifests through labor exploitation and capital transfer.