Jim heartfield wrote:
> If racism were one uniform, undifferentiated
> precondition of everything in America (and on your expanded version) the
> rest of the world, then clearly it is unavoidable.
Who said anything about it being "uniform" or "undifferentiated." The point I hammer at is that the main (differentiated) form it takes is that of making it a merely individual thing, and therefore individuals can deny that "they" are racist. So my remarks (or Doug's version) are hammering home a truism that has to be grasped, understood, incorporated into one's very way of perceiving the world, before one can intelligently take care of what you want to call the differentiation.
When a white person in the U.S. feels that he/she is in some special way being spat on, the *form* of that feeling is the inner conviction that they are not being treated (in the words of a famous American slogan) as "free, white, and 21." The racism is there, always, deeply embedded.
Now it takes long books to get a good historical grasp of racism past and present. No argument there. But first people simply *have* to stop quibbling about the all pervasiveness of it, it's shaping force on human relations in the United States.
And I repeat, the most disgusting form of racism, the form which is the chief barrier to fighting it, is the form which includes (implicitly or explicitly) the claim, "I'm not racist."
Carrol