let me try to diagnose 'unconscious racism', which has reached an amazing hallucinatory pitch of intensity at which the whole society is structured on racist lines (residential, educational, political, income, incarceration rates, unemployment, etc), but no actual person is a racist. here's how that happened. one aspect of the civil rights movement - which continues to be central - is speech control. the word 'nigger' for example, is an emblem of racism, but then people made the faulty inference that if you eliminated the word, you would have ameliorated the injustice. more widely, people have been very confused about the relation of words to reality, and have really seemed to think that if you forced people to use the right words, you would have substantially addressed the problem. words are powerful, after all, though sometimes that seems hard to believe when everyone is yapping slop to no effect for decades on end.
now, combine this with the fact that the culture more or less came to a consensus that racism is evil. at this point white folk p faces a syllogism: 'racists are evil; i am a racist; therefore i am evil'. there are various ways for p to deal with this personal crisis. one would be to spend long years reflecting on and dismantling a wide-ranging structure of racial attitudes. the other would be to leave all the attitudes intact and just deny that he is a racist. or run the thing backwards: 'racists are bad people; i am a good person; therefore i am not a racist'. you spend all day muttering to yourself 'i am a good person' 'i am a good person' 'i am not a bad person'. that is what the worst people have where other people have a conscience; they have a voice that says 'i am a good person'; and they need that voice; it gets them through whatever bad things they want to do or believe.
maybe you don't know this, but when white people talk to other white people they very often do this: 'i am not a racist, but...' 'i don't have a racist bone in my body, but...' i take such locutions as demonstrating the combined self-delusion and racism of the people who utter them. at any rate, the obsession with words in the various liberation movements hints that to be a racist is to have certain epithets or stereotypical characterizations run through your head. so, to not be a racist, all you have to do is censor your internal monologue. once you have, your internal monologue features paraphrases of the censored material rather that material itself, and so you spend the rest of your life congratulating yourself on your substantial accomplishment and for being such a very good person. also you get to unconsciously clean up on your own advantages, and to focus on your great deservingness.
it's unconscious alright, and it's unconscious because of each person's extremely concerted failure to introspect, each person's program of self-esteem enhancement. this is a safari into the dark heart of whiteness, or the white heart of darkness, if you prefer.
if ever there was a demonstration that there is more to the world than words, this would be it. (if you need such a demonstration, however, that's just sad.) anyway, it's all euphemisms, self-delusion, and an intractable situation on the ground. then people, every time out, wish desperately for a 'free-wheeling' or 'frank' 'dialogue'. this is after decades of imposing overwhelming social sanctions on the frank expression of racial attitudes. it's because of those sanctions that people are desperate for the dialogue, and it's because of those sanctions that the dialogue is impossible. and it's partly because of those sanctions that white liberals live in a stupor of self-congratulation, and partly because of them that you can have an obviously racist society in which no one believes of themselves that they are racist. also, at that point, there is very little hope for change, because it is impossible even to describe the situation honestly.
