^^^^^^^^ CB: The evidence that US society in 2009 is racist is that in most categories of quantity and quality of life Red, Brown and Black people are worse off statistically than White people. Life expectancy/mortality, morbidity, income, net worth, level of educational attainment, employment/unemployment, billionaires, millionaires, supervisery positions, executive positions, living near abandoned buildings , drug houses, and illegal dumping, living near environmental pollutants, et al. Until those gross and trenchant discrepancies go away, "racism do exist" as Coleman Young once put it. Also, this is why anti-affirmative action is racist, because, what other way but through some form of affirmative action will this structure of racist discrimination be deconstructed ?
On another dimension here, to understand the distinction between "personal" racism and structural racism, consider Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is "personally" Black. He is more of a structural racist or done more to perpetuate structural racism than 99% of White people. I want to say he has done more to continue structural racism than 100% of the Ku Klux Klan, but George Bush , William Rehnquist, et al. may be or have been members of the KKK. Anyway, I don't know that Thomas is personally prejudice against Black people ,though that is not impossible. No matter if he is, because his major role in making the racist reverse discrimination/anti-affirmative action doctrine the law of the land means he has done more to keep structural racism than the most racist average white person. Ward Connerly is another example. He organized the initiative in Michigan and elsewhere to make affirmative action unconstitutional.
Even GM and the Pentagon opposed outlawing affirmative action, which poses an interesting historical development question for the basic Marxist formulation concerning racism as a main divider of the working class. Perhaps this development suggests what to do with all the attention on this thread and elsewhere to the "separation" of rich and middle class Black people from working class and poor Black people. Maybe now the bourgeoisie scheme to leave the working class divided by race, and further divide Black people from each other on top of that. They want to minimize the possibility of future Angela Davises, Malcolm X's and ML Kings (and O's, smile).
On the identity of racism and imperialism/colonialism, and workers of all countries failing to unite and failing to lose their chains, Europe seems to be now backing historically into an Americanization, as the rightwing rises there on the prejudice and racism of white working masses against darker peoples going "home" to their former colonialist metropoles.