Racism exists at both the individual and systemic levels. When white prejudice and bigotry combine with the power occasioned by privilege based on skin color this combination directs social, economic, and political constructs that trigger episodic oppression of the powerless in society. In the case of the United States of America the powerless is the Black race, brought thus by years of chattel slavery, discrimination, and segregation.
Today's slave legacy and modern oppression are manifested by white media bias, and the denial of certain liberties of Black people. At its zenith it is the unadulterated hatred of America's first Black president and the trigger happy behavior of white cops killing Black people, especially Black males, at alarming rates AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT. White racism's laws are designed to protect white privilege and punish Black transgressions for real or perceived actions. It used to be that a Black man watching a white woman would be grounds for a violent beating or lynching; nowadays if you did not answer a cop's questions "like a boy" you're rude and can get shot for "disrespecting a police."
It therefore is this pervasive, systemic nature of American white racism that has allowed it to remain intact for so long. That and the fact that Americans and American leaders have remained reluctant to deal with racism and have taken the coward's way out -- pretending it does not exist. Like how the Confederate Flag entered the fray and now dominate the discussion about the murders in a South Carolina church.
America was built on white privilege and a social structure akin to colonization and forced slave labor. When these systems coalesced they produced a form of oppression that is adaptive and enduring. At the very base of this oppression is the simple fact that in American society "whiteness" is the norm and everyone else is "them" and different. Today, whiteness is presented as goodness, virtuous and clean while Blackness and the "other" "vile, lazy, welfare queens and the ignorant."
Let me end with a quote from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL):
"During the past 500-1000 years, racism on the part of Western powers toward non-Westerners has had a far more significant impact on history than any other form of racism (such as racism among Western groups or among Easterners, such as Asians, Africans, and others). The most notorious example of racism by the West has been slavery, particularly the enslavement of Africans in the New World (slavery itself dates back thousands of years). This enslavement was accomplished because of the racist belief that Black Africans were less fully human than white Europeans and their descendants."
Amen to that.
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