As a kind of convenience, I'll present these thoughts as responses to an article with Micha brought to my attention. These aren't meant to be a comprehensive treatment of the subject, just a few thoughts.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a post about the intersection of race and crime that dovetails with a conversation I had shortly after learning my friend Brian had been shot last week. I got to thinking about how the economic effects of past racism create breeding grounds for new racism—at once more subtle and more difficult to extirpate.

But how much of the economic misfortune is really caused by racism? There are other causal factors, such as welfare programs creating dependency, absentee fathers failing to bring their sons up right, various effects of the drug war, and so on. Is it even at the root of very much? In other times, minorities have been the object of severe hostility but have succeeded economically. Jewish and Chinese minorities succeeded in the face of severe hostility. My sense of it is that racism accounts for virtually none of the economic misfortune of blacks in America, that racism generally speaking accounts for virtually none of the economic misfortunes suffered by most any ethnic group - in times of sufficient peace. Genocides can, of course, be perpetrated against minorities, for example.

And I even found myself wondering whether, paradoxically, the healthy social consensus about the unacceptability of racism doesn’t make it more difficult to root out in its less obvious but arguably most pernicious forms.

If it's causing problems then maybe it's not so healthy after all. And how much of it is really 'social consensus', at least in any spontaneous sense, and how much is adaptation to the legal environment? As a point of analogy, a lot of people think that selling cocaine is really bad but selling tobacco and alcohol isn't that big a deal and selling caffeine is no big deal at all. This is surely not a spontaneous social consensus but an adaptation to the legal environment. Were the law changed, people's attitudes would change.

This is not to say that the spontaneous social consensus would be that racism is acceptable. There are different ways of being unacceptable. Arithmetic errors, spelling errors, the f-word, inattention in class, and any number of other things are each unacceptable in their own way. There is an element of fear and panic nowadays associated with being thought a racist, which may have a connection, if an indirect one, with the current legal environment.

[...]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.

Well, that's right, they're not irrational, and this is an important point. If you're going to condemn rationality then you've set up a herculean task for yourself, because rationality will reassert itself again and again, and if you condemn it then it will hide itself from the light of day. But the problem here is that you're wrong and your target is right. If you condemn the right and seek to replace it with the wrong, then you don't have truth and reason on your side any more, all you have is (possibly) power. People are going to be much more receptive if you can clearly show that such-and-such demonstrable bias is demonstrably irrational.

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.

Do you know this for a fact? Do you know how extensive the effect is? Are you engaging in a bit of mindreading here?

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.

Tragic to be sure, but if it's rational to be suspicious then if you try to make the owner feel bad for being rational then you're wrong and he's right, and nothing especially good will come of you attempting to "correct" him.

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.

If you include valid statistical heuristics as racist then I most definitely am racist and will always be racist and nothing you or I or anyone can do will stop it. But if by 'racist' you mean that my heuristic is actually mistaken, then you actually need to prove that it's mistaken. Which is, admittedly, hard work. But it's work you have to do if you want to really induce me to drop that heuristic. It's work I have to do if I want to induce myself to drop that heuristic.

Understand what I'm saying here. I'm saying that you need to prove case by case that there is racism and that it's not necessarily easily to do. A particular judgment may in fact be entirely rational. The mere fact that it employs race does not automatically make it irrational.

It's not good for a person to be mugged repeatedly only by young black men and to be aware of the statistics and yet repeat to himself or herself, 'it's racist to be afraid of the black guy behind me in this dark alley.' That's not virtuous - that's insane, it is a rebellion against a person's own rationality. And it's not going to work. At most it's going to make the person feel uselessly guilty for not being able to help being rational. The Catholic Church gets criticized for something similar: apparently in essence it treats human nature as sinful, and so naturally, all Catholics sin and sin repeatedly, and confess and do penance and are forgiven repeatedly. That, at any rate, is the impression I gather admittedly from some distance.

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

Sure. But there's something else: it's possible to be so incoherent and/or unfair about what counts as racism that it becomes more difficult to root out racism. If by 'racism' you mean nothing other than true bias - not statistically justified heuristics but true bias that systematically misleads - then you've made your task easier. But when you fail to distinguish between the valid and the invalid, when you declare off-limits all use of the category of race by the brain to draw conclusions about an unknown person, then you are doing the same thing that lawmakers do when they impose unjust law. What they do is induce a loss of respect for law, for all law, and an increase of fear of law, desire to avoid law, desire to run in the opposite direction whenever the police are around. And what you do if you're not careful in what you call racist is replace understanding and agreement with fear. You make people shut up and shut down when you come around with your inquisition. You will still get people nodding, but they will be nodding the way North Koreans praise the Great Leader. Watch North Koreans and they look like they're madly in love with the Great Leader, but you know and I know that it is not based on understanding and agreement with the Great Leader. You and I know that it is based on fear.

[...] But the variety of racism more common today is more subtle than that, and in a way more pernicious for it, since the overt bigot is unlikely to wield much social power. It’s the subliminal reaction of the manager looking for a new cashier who, for some reason he can’t articulate, just doesn’t think the minority candidate seems quite trustworthy enough. It’s this person who we most want examining his own attitudes. But to do that means being prepared to start from the difficult premise that even he—educated, urbane, kind, and so on—may indeed harbor racial biases. Like Hitler! Like a Klansman!

Maybe he does and maybe you're trying and failing to read his mind. The very hiddenness of the supposedly subterranean racism creates a problem of knowledge. If it's hidden, how do you know it's there? If it's there, to what degree are you exaggerating that it's there? When you start condemning and hunting that which is invisible, then you create a situation that doesn't entirely fail to resemble the witch hunts. Back when they hunted witches, they were also hunting the hidden and the invisible. In fact, how do you seriously propose to avoid this turning into a witch hunt? It may already be already a witch hunt.

Now, there’s an obvious way around this, though it should make us uncomfortable for different reasons. We could make a point of talking about race bias and stereotyping in a more gradated way. At one pole is the Klansman. At another, there’s that “typical white person” who is more guarded and alert walking past a black guy at 1am on 7th and V than he would be walking past a similarly-dressed white person.

There's also the "typical black person". How racist is he or she? Can we (typical white people) even talk about such a generality without risk of being branded racists ourselves? Do we dare make easy generalizations about the "typical black person", as easily as Obama makes about the "typical white person"? Obama makes a generalization about a "typical white person" which you accept without trouble even though he has presented no statistical studies backing up his claim. But if I were to say a bunch of things about the "typical black person", I would be almost certain to be condemned as racist not only if I didn't have statistics to back me up, but even if I did have statistics to back me up. People hear Obama easily talk about the "typical white person" and immediately they recognize a form that they themselves would be roundly condemned for employing in the other direction. Is it any wonder that they feel something is off here? And this obvious lack of fairness is yet another problem with the campaign against racism. This is a serious inconsistency, a serious unfairness, and the rational mind rightly rebels against it.

But think about the defensiveness, even outrage, we saw in response to Obama’s “typical white person” comment:

The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know (pause) there’s a reaction in her that doesn’t go away and it comes out in the wrong way.

Is this really controversial?

In addition to what I wrote above, here's Instapunk on Obama.

The world has long needed an heir to Teddy Kennedy, a younger master of the art of beiing rich and well connected while condemning everyone who does actual work.

Now we have him. Aren't you happy? I know I am. There's nothing better in life than being lectured about how we're supposed to be by people who have never accomplished a damn thing but getting elected to the public trough.

That is one more explanation of the allergic reaction to Obama's words.

[...] So reservations notwithstanding, maybe there’s something to be said for acknowledging that, as the Avenue Q song has it, “everyone’s a little bit racist.” I’ll accuse myself here: At 2am on 7th and V, I am not color blind. Maybe that bias is defensible at that time and place. That doesn’t mean it’s not a bias, or that it’s not potentially dangerous.

To the extent that it is defensible, then it is not a bias.

[...] 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.

I go through something like this myself as a male, regardless of my race. In certain situations I cause caution in people who don't know me for no other reason than I am male, even though I am in fact no danger to them. They don't know that. But how is this in the slightest their fault? The people to blame, if anyone, are the other males who have created this rational response. Those are the only people I can see myself rightly blaming for the caution that people rationally exercise in certain situations around me. Other people like me. To be entirely fair, then, when a young black law-abiding man is treated with rational suspicion, should he not blame, should we not all blame, other young black men who are not so law-abiding? Rather than the ones who have good reason to be suspicious of this young black man who they don't know anything about.

It seems unrealistic to expect the skittish whites to just knock it off.

It's unrealistic because it's unfair - if you like, grotesque - to ask them to shut off their own reason. And meanwhile, what about actual racism? Actual bias? Actual systematically wrong judgments? Are you ready really to prove case by case that this exists? Or do you want to condemn both actual bias and the use of reason as 'racist' whenever an unknown person's race is used as a clue about him? Certainly, it is much easier for you to do the latter, because it is a lot easier to see that race is used as a clue than it is to see whether its use was rational or irrational, statistically justified or statistically unjustified. It's easier, then, to condemn both, because it's hard to distinguish between them. But it creates a problem when you do so.