I think that, just because racism carried with it a biological component at one point, it doesn't necessarily follow that racism still operates the same way. Maybe we should call it something else, as Grant suggests. But, the one thing it's useful for, it seems to me, is that it is about identifying _racializing processes_(it's a process, not a product! :). Racializing processes are about marking bodies and we can understand that marking as being very far removed from the actual appearance of those bodies.
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After reading your post (and Angela's of a few years back) an old thought returned to the fore.
I think what we're seeing in cases of classism, racism (color based and otherwise) and other types of group against group antagonism is old fashioned tribal conflict dressed up in modern clothes.
In the West, it's typical to describe the group affiliations of non-Western peoples as tribal and of Westerners as 'communities'. The idea is that Western societies, the touchstone we're told of modernity in thought, lifestyle and technique, have moved far beyond tribalism to a more flexible and 'advanced' level of social organization. Smarmy Salon.com or Time magazine writers may write about the 'skatepunk tribe' or the 'body piercing tribe' but they're merely trying to be clever and don't take the term seriously.
Almost no one believes tribalism is a fact of Western life.
This is not entirely bullshit; there is indeed greater freedom of social movement in the US than in more homogenous societies. Or, so I'm told and generally believe.
I don't think however, that the tribal impulse - the human tendency to segregate into groups of 'people like us' - has died here or anywhere else on earth.
In the past, you were born into the one and only group you'd belong to for life. Modernity's innovation has been the introduction of some degree of fluidity - I can segregate myself as a leftie on Tuesday, an Afro-Cuban on Wednesday, a techie on Thursday... American modernity's innovation has been the near total erasure of White tribes (Irish, Italian, etc) into the super-tribe of US-er Whiteness. This process was greased along by the presence of non-Whites as a point of comparison among other factors. The categories Black, Asian and Hispanic are similarly de-ethnicized super-groupings.
I believe a fundamental part of human behavior is at work when we segregate along color or income or belief or lifestyle lines. American anti-racists hope the end of color-based racism will mean an end to the most troubling sort of group against group conflict. I think our habits run too deep and, even if color-racism were to die, we'd simply find new, multi-culti ways to divide ourselves from one another.
There's already evidence this post-modern tribalism (possibly the dominant mode once the 21st century really gets going with its own vibe) is being born.
I understand the desire for new terms to describe what racism and its fellow travellers have become in the early 21st century. Still, I think a perfectly servicable old word exists: tribalism.
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In Stanislaw Lem's science fiction short story, "Golem", a recently activated AI lectures an assembled group of scientists and intellectuals. "You have so recently come down from the trees and out of the broad savannahs" the machine says "that you still have the feeling of the branches in your hands and the scent of the swaying grasses in your nostrils. This is your heritage. But if man is to survive in the age of nuclear weapons and global problems, those parts of yourself you cherish the most - that make you 'natural' must die. Yes, 'natual man' must die for humanity to live..."
This may be over-stating the case; perhaps we can develop those 'natural' bits to learn to cooperate and thrive (isn't this the goal of socialism?). Considering our history and present, there is reason for tremendous pessimism.
DRM