Earlier racism seems to have been based on wrong notions of fact: black people are lesser human beings and deserve their station as slaves or an underclass. Any form of mixing is bad due to natural laws. With a dollop of the usual hatred and fear of someone different. BTW, this is not entirely gone. As I have mentioned before, it has been bizarre to listen to white coworkers in the US describe how outsourcing of IT will not affect them because they do high-level technical work which just cannot be done by Indians (subtext: of course not you, ravi, Indian, but those Indians in India).
^^^^^ CB: There's a good chance that the notions of the biological or essential inferiority of darker peoples has gone underground since the victory of the 1960's US Civil Rights Movement made it "improper" to publicly express same. Except , of course, most of those who have this thinking do not think in the terms of the discipline of biology or anthropology. They weren't ever persuaded by Stephen Jay Gould or Franz Boas that racism is an invalid way of thinking. The Tea Party and motley crew seem to be full of people who have some concept of the inherent inferiority of darker peoples.
^^^^
But today, the difference between racism and anti-racism is one of interpretation of fact. As CB noted, there are structural causes to outcomes - the outcome differential that results from these structural causes is racism. But here we enter a theoretical realm.
One theoretical tack: One can look at the persistent attainment differences between groups and claim that these cannot be entirely explained by individual actions (or lack thereof). If there isn’t something in the individual body (as shown and accepted by the first round of anti-racism effort), then there has to be something about the environment.
^^^^^ CB: On environment, starting maybe around the time of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's thesis of the Matriarchal Black Family, the "inherent" characteristic of Black people that was substituted for biological race as the cause of the general poorer quality and quantity of life of Black people was the notion that Black families had been destroyed substantially ( by racism , I think it was admitted by some !). At any rate, the living generation of white American's overwhelmingly disdain the notion that they have any responsibility for this state of the Black family, even if it was the result of racism, because that racism was before they were alive. This intellectual gambit creates the effective equivalent to the prior theory of some sort of essential inferiority of colored peoples whatever the specifics. It is the basis for rejecting affirmative action ,and considering welfare as mainly Black and colored people freeloading on whites. These pillars of Reaganism carry out the old ruling class mission for racism , dividing the working class, in the new generations.
In fact, determining white supremacist dynamics still exist in the post-Civil Rights victory generations. There is "fresh" white supremacy reproducing and reinforcing the racist institutions and advantages. The differential in life expectancy, morbidity, income/poverty, education, etc remains major and central in the US.
^^^^^^^^ That’s the leftist type argument, from what I can tell. But there are other theoretical tacks one could take (such as individual responsibility based on free will, arguments and statistics about the suffering of Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, etc) which even if theoretically unsound gives off not the stench of racism but the fragrance of intellectual debate and disagreement and one’s own individual merit (the immigrant wife of one friend wrote to me defending strong limits on and reduction of welfare, with the simple logic that if she could make it, having arrived almost penniless on these shores, then why not others who were born here and “enjoyed” welfare and still made nothing of themselves?).