There was a time when I might’ve jumped into this with an “it’s more nuanced than that” kind of reply, but that’s started to ring a bit hollow to me. As a white American born in the South, I’ve started to hear disturbing similarities between the sort of apology that claims there’s something more subtle going on in America than rank bigotry and the old canard among Confederate apologists that the Civil War was about something more nuanced than slavery. In either case of course there are finer details to parse, but in either case making that case is most often a moral whitewash that purposely directs attention away from the forest by pointing out interesting details of the trees, because the forest is pretty unpleasant to face.
The US is structurally and culturally racist. Most of the weird internal quirks of our government that cause us persistent consternation (e.g., the Electoral College) were born not because of the unassailable and ineffable wisdom of our remote “Founders,” but because those founders deeply compromised their intentions in order to protect slaveholding states from abolitionists. We’ve had almost 250 years to fix those compromises, long after the institution motivating them was destroyed, but instead we’ve entrenched them all the more deeply, and compounded them with new racist-motivated policies. America’s cutthroat “winners and losers” mentality is just thinly coded racism. The “losers” people don’t want to support with their tax dollars or grant even the most basic social framework other developed nations take for granted are invariably offensive minority stereotypes. You’ll even hear right-wing apologists explicitly say that social programs can work in Scandinavia but not the US because those other nations are “more homogenous.” They can’t mean economically homogenous, because that would beg the question: it’s the policies we allegedly can’t implement here that foster a more homogenous economy. The sentiment in America is, “we can’t do that here because lazy brown people would take advantage of hardworking white people.” And Americans buy that, one election cycle after another. We have this ongoing game we play where we cannot write laws that explicitly discriminate on the basis of race, so we write laws that nominally apply to everyone, but in practical effect cut with laser precision against already-disadvantaged minority communities. When the laws do cut against poor white people as well, they’ll mythologize their own heroic struggle and still vote for those policies to prevent poor nonwhites from benefiting.
America is going to pieces because a solid plurality of the nation has never been able to adapt to the idea of black people as their legal and moral equals, and because it’s been more expedient for power brokers all over the spectrum, at various times, to exploit that rather than correct it. We are fish and structural racism is the water we don’t fully perceive because we swim in it our whole lives. That’s why class issues are so hard to tease apart from issues of race in America: the issues of race saturate everything.
