Domingo Soto: Because Freedom Isn't Dumb

THE VIRUS OF RACISM
Some pundits are engaging in blather about the emergence of a "New Racism", insisting rather ironically that whites rather than people of color are the real victims of personal and institutional racism. This article does a tremendous job in describing the reality of an emerging "New Racism". It's fault, I think, lies in treating the two as separate things and in talking about "Old Racism" as something whose time has passed. They can be more easily explained as permutations of each other not unlike a virus that has reconstituted itself. The "old racism", defines differences in terms of fixed biological categories. The emerging strain operates in various guises, proclaiming race-neutrality, asserting culture as a marker of racial difference or marking race as a private matter. While the old crude form of racism uses biological referents and pseudo-scientific legitimations and buttresses its appeal to white racial superiority, this new strain cynically recodes itself within the vocabulary of the civil rights movement, invoking the language of Martin Luther King Jr. to argue that individuals should be judged by the "content of their character" and not by the color of their skin.
(TRUTHOUT)