How do we qualify "racism"?
What someone says?
What someone does?
It is a difficult question to answer in part because, whether we like it or not, race is a myth, one which has created artificial differences among diverse peoples based on scant and superficial niceties like skin and hair color.
Do we judge people's thoughts? Do we judge people's private papers to make a case of racism against someone?
And why do we get jumpy about what someone is thinking, when we have no business nor capacity to assess the innermost of any person.
Racism, then, becomes an empty joke in a society that wants to create good guys and bad guys, a meaningless "we" versus "they" to advance illicit political causes and broaden the girth of government into our private lives.
Prejudice, more precise a term, is natural, inevitable, and more harmful to the person who practices it than the person who perceives it.
Outright discrimination, judging and limiting a person based on what they look like, is a rotten folly, one that can be summarily punished with just response.
But let us not kid ourselves. Racism, as understood as negative (or even unsupported positive) assumptions about people is endemic to human nature, always quick to catalogue and exploit rather than accept and adapt to human experience.
In the final analysis, political correctness and "racial sensitivity" were supposed to make all of us more tolerant of each other, not give us more reasons to be resentful and suspicious.
If we choose not to like one another, let us have a firm basis for our antipathies beyond what we see or presume in each other.
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