by Omagus

Created on: June 12, 2008

I was recently accused of being a racist.

I'm a regular poster on the NBA boards at FOXsports.com. At one point some of my fellow posters and I started talking politics (I know, I know...talking politics on a sports website is just a disaster waiting to happen) and someone accused Barack Obama of being racist due to his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I disagreed and added what I thought was an offhand comment about Wright not being completely off-base. This kick-started a campaign by two other posters who said that by agreeing with Wright in this matter that I must also be racist. This completely confused me and we went back and forth for quite a while until I realized that there had been a miscommunication almost from the get go. The person who had initially mentioned Jeremiah Wright claimed that the reverend had said that White people attempted to commit genocide against Black people in this United States. When I responded with the "he's not completely off-base" comment, what I had in mind was what Wright actually said, which was the United States government had attempted to commit genocide against Black people in the U.S., with the "not off-base" part being a reference to the Tuskegee Experiments.

Whether or not that actually got cleared up is not entirely clear to me. It's possible that the two other posters might still think that I am racist. I don't find that to be a particularly big deal. I know that I'm not. Or at least I don't think that I am; it's probably better to ask people who know me to get a more accurate answer. But that conversation has caused me to start thinking...what exactly is racism?

At one point during the debate at FOX sports, I tried to explain the difference between individual racism and socialized racism, which seemed to fall on deaf ears. That frustrated me but I am not at all surprised. In modern day America, I think we've done a fairly decent job of villainizing the racism that is part of the nation's historical make up. No sane person today thinks that slavery or the decimation of the Native American nations were good things. Most people realize that the government-sanctioned treatment of non-White (and specifically Black) people as recently as the middle of the 20th century was appalling. Today, it's pretty hard to find a group of people who are more commonly reviled than the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis. These are good things.

However...

We have done ourselves a disservice here because we've gotten to the point where the

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