Here we go again: you guys seem to have utterly missed the point of the author's preamble. Racism exists, but there are interactions regarding race that get caught up in other struggles, your own comments included. I agree with your general points about some of the excesses of reactionary politics. However, that doesn't mean that their excesses prove that blacks by and large get a fair deal, or equal opportunity, or any of these things. Life is SO MUCH BETTER than it used to be for all racial minorities, and some of them take advantage of this, and others do not--yet that doesn't mean that everything is "fine" and there is no more work to do. Perhaps that work is often misapplied, but it still needs doing. Indeed your own comments contain within them the kind of "racism" to which some of them allude: you are so certain that the radical left is wrong, and that blacks have just as much opportunity, that ANY effort to redress the legacies of racism (actual racism notwithstanding), is seen by you as bullshit. Your ignorance on such matters is so knee-jerk it strikes others as being "racist," when it may or may not be. Here's where it is likely to reflect at least vestigial racism: insisting that you don't feel guilty for having your tax dollars subsidize welfare and out of wedlock children. Um, explain to me how that sort of stereotyping isn't racist?