I find nothing more difficult to do than to explain racism to racists—black and white. In this nation, racism is so deeply entrenched, so troublesomely institutionalized, that rooting it out may very well be impossible. It will certainly take both time and education. The more worrisome racists, to me, are the liberals who don’t think they’re racist. I live in a town full of people like that. Community leaders, pastors, and yes neighbors whom, were you to point out racist behavior, would externalize their resentment and perhaps their guilt by becoming preemptively and inappropriately angry at you for having pointed it out. In other words, they’d prove they weren’t racist by demonizing and attacking you for having suggested such a thing.

This was the whole embarrassing saga of Geraldine Ferraro, outraged that the “Obama campaign” had smeared her as racist after she suggested Obama would not be where he was were he not a black male. Obama called Ferraro’s remarks, “ridiculous,” but at no point, to my knowledge, did he even *suggest* she was a racist. Still Ferraro went on the offensive, declaring her outrage and villainizing the Obama campaign for playing the race card.

This is the most frustrating part of the discussion: the stupidity. Most especially among liberal whites, educated and affluent whites, who believe they are either beyond or above such things as racism. Which denies the undeniable truth of the institutionalized nature of racism. By “institutionalized” we are talking about something so endemic, so inbred and handed down from one generation to the next, that for me to stand here and tell you I have no struggle with it is either intellectual cowardice or simple immaturity.

I’ve heard whites ask, “Why do you have to make everything about race?” which is, in and of itself, an absurd question. Women—of any color—know, instinctively, when they are being sexually harassed. Most women have been sexually harassed since childhood—it’s a sensitivity honed over a lifetime of experience. Blacks in this country experience racism every single day of their lives. Usually in small ways, mostly insignificant, but they’re there. And my suggestion would be that all blacks certainly know racism when they experience it. But we’re simply not allowed to point it out. Anything less than a cross burning on my lawn will not meet the threshold most whites have for what they consider racism to be.

Racism isn’t the cross burning on the lawn. Racism is people hating you and then looking for the reason why after the fact. Racism is people not giving you the benefit of the doubt, not hearing your side of the story, but going off on irrational and often illogical tangents while forming lynch mobs.

Saddest of all is the racism deeply entrenched within us. On a recent MSNBC Town Hall Meeting, noted social scholar The Reverend Michael Eric Dyson said, “The Black Elite has internalized the pathology of self-hatred by demonizing the poor, putting their colossal foots (sic) on the necks of vulnerable poor people without reaching out to help them.” Dialogues about race are inevitably also about economics as the problems that plague American society find both cause and effect in the tragic immaturity of racism, including intra-racism within the black community itself.

The last thing I want to do is call anyone a racist. So I bend over backward, usually going much farther than I should, to allow for other factors for why someone is being unfathomably hostile toward me. I feel I need to rule out every one of dozens of possible motives before settling, with great reluctance, on racism. Mainly because I think racism is so utterly stupid, so irrational and so ridiculous and immature. I’d really like to believe we’re moving past all of that.

But I also recognize the seed of race hate is within me. It’s rare that I meet blacks who take an instant disliking to me. Rare, but it happens. With whites, however, it’s quite common. To either be politely avoided, or to sense irrational hostility from people I don’t even know. To have people always assume the worst about me, for no fathomable reason and with absolutely no empirical evidence that I am either a bad or immoral person.

Jesus said, before criticizing your brother, you should first examine yourself [Matt. 7:3]. Before pointing fingers at this guy or anybody else, the first thing I need to do is deal with my own race hatred, which doesn’t present itself in any material way, but I’d be a liar to say that seed wasn’t planted within me after 46 years of being called a nigger. What offends and deeply troubles me, however, is when white people act like they have no racism, that it doesn’t exist for them at all. It’s a lie. It’s there. And I can prove it.

The MSNBC Town Hall meeting begins with a heartbreaking video clip of young black children asked to choose between two dolls—one black, one white—and assail the virtues and insufficiencies of either. The self-hatred, evident already at so early an age, is simply shocking and terrifying. That children too young to even read have already had this evil planted within them. And that racism isn’t only about Whitey, but is, like all evil, ultimately turned back on ourselves.