the Varieties of Racism

I've been reading a fantastic book (Dog Whistle Politics) on the coded racial language that politicians use to scare people and get votes (specifically, how Republicans are able to get poor white people so scared that they will vote against their own interests).

Hate
Actual hatred or animosity. The Klu Klux Klan, for example, when they were hanging black people from trees. Simple, obvious, crazy, gets all the attention; yet it's the least common nowadays. Do you know many people that actually hate black people? Didn't think so (or at least they won't admit it).

The sad thing about this form of racism - actual hatred - is that our Supreme Court has adopted it as the only kind of racism...good luck proving that your employer actually hates you because you're black. According to Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), this has made the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 impotent and meaningless.

Institutional
The American prison system is the best example (read The New Jim Crow if you want your mind blown). If you look at the shocking statistics of African American men in our prison system, you can only come to one reasonable conclusion: the entire criminal justice system is, so to speak, racist. Or, another way to put it, African American men are disproportionately represented in the prison system (and that's a huge understatement). But it's a tricky thing. One person is not behind this kind of racism, it happens slowly, and it's hard to track down. But it's effects are quite obvious; a racist tree will produce racist fruits; whether it's housing, jobs, or government programs.

Unconscious
If a white person walks by a black person on the street, typically something will happen in their brain that resembles fear. This is sad be true (I have read that several experiments were done on this). In America, we have been taught to fear black men; and so we do. It's nothing that we did, it's simply the air we breath, the culture we live in, what we learned from media, and the long history of oppression that we inherited. As Carl Young might say, racism is part of our Collective Unconscious. And that is a scary thing.

Nixon used race as a political tool, called the Southern Strategy

Strategic/Political
Perhaps the most insidious of all is when politicians use racism for political gain (again, utilitarian thinking rears its ugly head). According to the book I'm reading, both parties are to blame but especially the modern Republican Party, which was essentially built on a racial platform (called the "Southern Strategy"). Have you ever wondered why poor white people vote for a Party that gives tax cuts to the rich and slashes social spending? Whether it's the coded racial language of politicians, the race-baiting of right wing media, or the non-stop fear mongering about Muslims and terrorists - white people are scared shitless.

Natural?
Some people make the argument that we evolved to naturally discriminate against human beings that look different than our tribe. I'm skeptical, and I'm not sure if this is widely accepted, and I don't know how much science this is based on, but I do know it's out there. Some people explain the happiness of Norway and Sweden, for example, by pointing out the fact that they all look similar. People obviously point to their progressive tax code and liberal laws as well. Interestingly, racism seems to be infecting these countries as outsiders trickle in.

I suppose I can see an evolutionary advantage to being skeptical of "outsiders"--that is, people that clearly are not part of your own cooperative survival group--but race is a different concept all together.