Oh my, big, big subject. To put it with Tom Petty: I ain't no racist, I don't even drive.
I had no issues with my daughter's black boy friend, he was a nice enough guy and I wish they would have worked it out. I don't believe in superiority based on pigmentation - the South African Apartheid system was inane in that way. But not being racist against the individual shouldn't let you close your eyes on statistic traits - good or bad - of the collective (as long as you don't automatically transpose your impressions of the collective on the individual - that is racism in my book). Denying that some black communities in the South take better care of their cars than of their houses is closing your eyes on reality, but it's no excuse for assuming that any black tenant will run down the house you let him, yet keep his Corvette or Mustang squeaky clean.
Likewise, it is a simple observation that white cops shoot more blacks than - ever thought about it? - black cops shoot whites. Which can lead you to all kinds of conclusions: That there are too few black cops and even fewer white criminals running from them or, disconcertingly, that the life of even a white man has perhaps more value to a black police officer than the life of a black man to a white police officer. In any case, I haven't yet heard of a drunk white couple being shot a hundred times and more by surrounding black policemen while sitting (or dying) in a car.
And whether people are the way they are (or tend to be perceived as being that way) due to destruction of their former tribal roots, men being torn away from their families and sold as slaves or too many indiscriminate welfare programs is another topic
we won't get to grips with here. (Reality very seldom follows party lines, it's probably all three and then some.)
For the record: I believe that people act in a certain way mainly due to their social influences (family, education, peer group, economic opportunities, role models, social history etc) and I believe to see evidence for that all the time - in contrast, the scientific determination that the amount of pigmentation of your skin determines how you act has yet to be made in my book. It can, however, determine how you are perceived and that is an issue. Hopefully, I manage to avoid it most of the time.
