Black crime, nonblack victims

The disturbing thing here is that while these reactions are at least arguably racist in some sense, they're not obviously irrational as a kind of statistical heuristic. In light of the facts on the ground--facts that are themselves substantially the product of past racism--they eventually become instinctive.

If it were limited in context, if it were only a matter of how conscious you are of the guy on the street at night, it might not be a serious problem. But that's not how reflexive reactions like this work. They tend to bleed over into contexts--the temp agency, the corner store--where they are both inappropriate and destructive. And the contexts aren't even all that separable: The skittish convenience store owner may have a statistical reason for being more nervous when a group of black or Latino male teenagers walk in, but the atmosphere of suspicion that creates for the vast majority who have no designs on the till is so toxic it's become a trope. Thinking in stereotypes comes easily to us, and it takes conscious effort to at least keep them cabined away where they will do least harm. And that requires entertaining that uncomfortable thought: I might, in some sense, be a racist.

Which leads me to wonder: Is it possible to be so opposed to racism that it becomes more difficult to root out racism?

What he means is that we have exactly one way of talking about racism in this country: as if it were all the same grotesque evil, with no gradation. There's no difference, at least in our public conversation, between the Klansman and the overly suspicious shopkeeper.
Julian says that this is harmful in part by making people who know they are not as evil as a Klansman give up on watching out for small-bore biases in themselves that they really ought to be doing. And it works in other ways too. I have personal experience with an office situation from several years back in which a white co-worker used a neutral term in a non-racial discussion that for some off-the-wall reason a minority co-worker took to be racist (this was a situation that didn't even rise to the level of "black hole"). The accusation was truly bizarre, but it unnerved the white co-worker so much that, fearing for his job, he pretty much quit talking to his black co-worker, for fear that someone so irrational could end up getting him fired by making an accusation. I thought later what a shame that was: an office friendship that could have ended up with both office mates learning something about each other's experiences and humanity -- and presumably, made the world a little less racist -- was shut down. I never talked to the black co-worker about what happened when I had the chance to, but I recall that the white co-worker was left pretty bitter about the whole thing, and certainly less racially sensitive.

Along these lines, I know plenty of people who look at things like the black Dallas County Commissioner who made a racial incident out of a white colleague calling an inefficient city agency a "black hole" as an excuse not to worry at all about racism. The idea is that there's no way not to be called a racist, so you might as well quit trying -- even though you might well have some truly racist beliefs in your heart that need repenting of. This is what I think Julian means, in part.

He continues:

The tricky part here is threading our way between, on the one hand, a sort of blunderbuss condemnation that creates a counterproductive incentive for people to conceal their biases even from themselves, and on the other, a lazy complacency about those biases. I don't know exactly how we do that. It seems beyond grotesque to ask the law-abiding black guy on the wrong end of a thousand suspicious glances to indulge the skittish whites. It seems unrealistic to expect the skittish whites to just knock it off.

Megan McArdle adds -- and I paraphrase here -- that combing one's conscience constantly looking for hidden nits of racism qualifies as Stuff White People Like ("white people" being liberal middle-class intellectuals):

With civil rights, we were asking people to slay dragons. Now we're asking them to spend the rest of their lives exterminating mosquitos. It may be true that a swarm of mosquitos is almost as bad, in toto, as a single dragon. But they don't summon the same sort of emotional energy.

I'm sure it has to do with the social and professional class in which I move, but racism as a subject of intellectual and moral inquiry is something that's never far from the minds of the people I tend to spend time with. I'm curious about the extent to which non-whites in the US think about their own racial biases in a critical way. Do blacks do what Ta-Nehisi Coates did, and think empathetically about whites scared of black street crime? Do Hispanics ever think about their prejudices against blacks? Or is it more the case that most blacks and most Latinos (and most Asians?) do what I suspect most whites do: never think about it, at least not in terms of self-criticism. In other words, I'd wager that for most Americans of whatever ethnic background, racism is something Other People are guilty of, not Us.