This is a response to a Facebook discussion that seemed to be bogged down in a circular firing squad formation over "who is racist?" One argument seemed to be "No one I know is a racist, so there must not be very many people who are".
If you all are interested in testing your own racial attitudes, go here: 'Harvard IAT'. However, your attitudes are irrelevant. All of our attitudes are irrelevant. What matters are the impacts of our attitudes on our actions. And in a country of 323 million people, we can only look at the aggregates of our actions. That takes statistics and history. Example: blacks and whites use illegal drugs at the same rate, but blacks are incarcerated at a rate that is 6 (SIX) times higher than whites. This is an outcome of a web of legal, political, educational, and economic actions across large communities and generations of history.
Many of the individual actors who create this network of injustice would certainly not be described as "racist", but by "just doing their job" they create an injustice that falls along racial lines. Now, if you all are interested in mapping a path to a future without these kinds of injustices, I would love to hear your ideas.
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