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That so many of us carry around these images as prototypes of bigotry is unfair and does us no good. Racism is a deeply rooted American value. Sure, it contradicts other American values like democracy, freedom, and equal opportunity, but we’ve lived with that contradiction for centuries. And we’ve piled centuries of racist ideas on top of one another in order to rationalize living with that contradiction – so much so that those rationalizations are as indigenous to American culture as basketball, baseball, and football, all sports whose spread around the world speaks to how U.S. culture ~~infects<\/del> affects the world.<\/p>\n~~

Making racism the exclusive purview of only certain types of people while letting mainstream racism off the hook is also all-American. It’s a distancing tactic that perpetuates the most effective and difficult to dislodge forms of racism that are all too mainstream, like Stand Your Ground laws<\/a> and our existing and currently proposed<\/a> immigration policies.<\/div>\n

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This tactic was widely popularized in the 1960s. Back then, horrific images of white on black violence in response to civil rights protests caused a shame reaction in Northern whites who quickly distanced themselves from their Southern brethren by popularizing the stereotype of the racist as working-class, small town, Southern, and uneducated.<\/p>\n

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Distancing of this sort is a trap that leads nowhere. And in case that didn’t cure ya, keep scrolling down –<\/div>\n

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That’s Jan Brewer, the Arizona Governor who signed Senate Bill 1070<\/a> into law in her state, taking racist anti-immigrant politicking to a new low by promoting racial profiling in immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n

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And here’s Pat Buchanan, graduate of Columbia University and the original host of CNN’s Crossfire.<\/em><\/a> He’s a former advisor to presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan who has suggested that the decline of American culture is the fault of immigration and the civil rights lobby, claimed that people can live on public subsidies “from cradle to grave…” and seems to think we’re in a race war.<\/p>\n

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And then there’s Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute<\/a>, the racist academic who wrote The Bell Curve.<\/a> He has suggested a relationship between intelligence and race, and while he also says that environment is also a factor (in terms that suggest that certain American subcultures that seem awfully tan to me are failing), he has further posited that there may be a genetic basis for intelligence. He’s a Harvard man, by the way.<\/p>\n

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And finally, there’s this guy, Newt Gingrich. Newt may not be a racist in his heart of hearts, but he’s happy to play one for votes by suggesting that poor black people are lazy freeloaders who’ve become overly dependent on welfare and food stamps, proving that when it comes to racism, it’s not just what you truly believe but what you actually do with those beliefs that matters.<\/p>\n

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