There's an additional layer of complexity: racial identities are inextricably tied to the world-market, and not just in the sense that, say, the Dutch colonists practiced apartheid on Indonesia for hundreds of years. Dubois' famous line, about the problem of the color line being the problem of the 20th century, also explicitly identified the turn-of-the-century crimes of the US Empire -- most notably, the annexation of Puerto Rico and a murderous counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines.
My guess is that racism in the US today, which is a key section of the Terror War, is tied to an occulted, mystified Fear of Brown People. (This was also an issue for Bush 41, if memory serves aright.) What's at issue is sheer demographic reality: according to official stats, white people are only 70% of the US population, and the Latino population is expanding rapidly. Another statistic, gleaned from the readings from the Education class I've been taking: forty percent of US kids in public schools are nonwhite in 2003, and that number will continue to rise. (Thus the ongoing war on public education). My guess is that the Texas oil gangsters currently in charge -- as well as the 15-20% of the US population who form their bedrock electoral support -- are psychologically in thrall to their own provincial political unconscious: Osama Bin Laden's crime was to disrupt the usual hierarchy of racial classifications.
-- DRR