SquallTheBlade said:
I have mixed opinions on the subject given how some of my relatives are.
To be honest I think there is a lot of reactive racism going on right now. In general racism has been dead as a mainstream phenomena in the US for a while. The white majority generally being extremely tolerant and having worked tirelessly to pretty much put that spectre to rest.
The problem is though that outside of the mainstream US culture racism is alive and well. The central philosophies and cultures of most asian countries, especially China and Japan, are incredibly racist, as are those from The Middle East, and South and Central America. A common arguement today made by many minorities when questioned about things like "Latin Power" Bumper Stickers, T-shirts, etc... are that they aren't racist, they are merely pro-whatever race they are... and really political correctness means that as long as they are a minority this isn't questioned. The same can be said of the outlook and attitudes that lead to segregated communities like Chinatown districts and the like.
With all the Black Power, Latin Power, Asian Master Race stuff, aggressive pushes by Middle Easterners especially during a time of crisis, and similar things it's impossible to ignore the racial divides no matter what your personal philosophy might be. Today when you have so many racial lines being drawn by minorities your starting to see the white majority reacting pretty negatively to it.
It's like this, if you ask some guy with a "Latin Power" logo if he's racist he'll say "nah, but my race is better and I support it as such". A point of view which scarily is overlooked and let go, but is no real differant than some Yahoo decades ago doing the same thing in the name of "White Power".
Needless to say when you have this kind of thing going on as a constant societal issue it leads to tensions, not only because of whites not liking it, but because of minority groups not liking each other either. Clashes between Blacks, Latinos, and Asians are both frequent and exceedingly nasty, but tend not to get much press when racially motivated. Chinatown districts can be paticularly nasty when defending their sanctity from outsiders.
The problem of course is that the white majority ties it's own hands in dealing with these problems because of the self-taught perception that if we step in and say decide to step on these groups of people to quash the racism, we ourselves would thus be the bad guys. Our hands being tied by white guilt so to speak while we allow problems to continue to get worse because we're unwilling to basically enforce the same policies on everyone. Right now for example it's a big deal if a black family has a problem moving into a white neighborhood, but if a white family wants to move into Chinatown and has problems that's not treated the same way, and even off the issue of whites simply dealing with blacks and latinos moving into each others unofficial neighborhoods is a big deal. A lot of gang violence and such has gone down due to the wrong kinds of people wanting to move onto the wrong street.
In the end it comes down to the increasingly valid question of "why should I like (insert group other than your own here), when they don't like me? treat me like crap, and broadcast themselves as a superior master race". Sure every one of those things could have been said about old school white supremacists, and it was wrong and a problem then, just like it is now. If anything I think we're seeing the return of racism to the US in a new form that has little or nothing to do with the majority.
Of course then again as people have pointed out, whites will no longer be the majority in the USA in a few decades. I think a lot of people overlook this as well. With the attitudes I've seen from a lot of Latinos and such I very much expect to see a problem with a majorly racist majority again, but that's probably long enough down the road (beyond the simple numbers) where the next generation is going to experience dealing with the brunt of it, especially if we continue to ignore these social problems as too touchy.
