What I said is not that there is this negative thing about his wife that he can see past despite its being bad. What I said (and I said it quite clearly to be seen by anyone not deliberately trying to twist it) is that he realizes that he has been negatively affected by society in all sorts of ways to see things that are not bad as bad. He has overcome those things or is trying to overcome them. This is at least a step beyond the people who don’t even realize that they’re there. It’s also at least a step beyond the person who doesn’t think it’s bad to have been conditioned in this way and just has to “see past it” as you’ve pretended I said. What I’m talking about simply is not what the word ‘racism’ properly refers to, which is someone who has a negative attitude toward those of another race. This is someone who is the opposite of that.

Now if you’re going to do the bait-and-switch method of using different senses of racism in order to twist what I’m saying, I’ll just head it off right now. It’s improper (as in inaccurate, though I’d extend it to immoral as well) to call someone a racist if you’re just talking about unconscious and unintended structures in society that are properly called institutional racism. Those are there, and those affect the kind of person I’m talking about. That’s what this person is overcoming. But that’s not the same thing as being a racist, and no stretch of the English language will ever make them the same thing.

There’s also what’s called residual racism, which is the unconscious and unintentional effects on individual people of institutional racism and attitudinal racism of others. As is true of everyone, this person has that, but that’s what this person is overcoming, and the very goal of overcoming it is what makes this person not a racist. If someone is a racist for having this, then in that sense every person on this planet is a racist. If you start misusing language that way, you’re not going to be able to distinguish between real racists and everyone else. So that’s an extremely bad idea. When we call people racists, that should be reserved for people who have a genuinely evil attitude toward people of other races (or toward their own race, as it might happen, though that’s a different enough phenomenon that I’m not even sure we should call that person a racist).

I have no problem talking about racism as an unconscious force that affects people unintentionally, but that isn’t the same as someone being a racist, which requires something far beyond what the sort of person I’m talking about has.

If your view is correct, I think you leave white people in an impossible situation. They’ve been negatively affected by residual racism and structural racism in society so that they instinctively view white as better. Once they realize that about themselves and seek to change themselves, you will see it as bad because it’s just trying to “see past it”. But if they remain as they are, you will call them racists for being affected by residual racism. So white people will be racists no matter what they do. The whole purpose of calling people racists is to distinguish between the ordinary white person and the one who is racist. You can’t do that with the kind of bait-and-switch move that you’re doing, and now we can no longer usefully call anyone a racist.

Where do I begin…

As someone who has had to be very deliberate in countering tendencies that I feel conditioned to have, I can say quite confidently that I think anyone marrying someone across racial lines in a way that requires reevalating and reconditioning in terms of standards of beauty (which I think is much more serious for white men marrying black women than for any other combination) will be extremely unlikely to be a racist.

So while I don’t think it’s true that someone in an interracial marriage can’t possibly be a racist, I do think being in such a marriage is very strong evidence against the person’s being a racist, at least if the reasons for getting married are similar enough to most people’s reasons for getting married.

Call me a pessimist, but as disturbing as that “war trophy” comment was to you (and me)… I’m not sure if the majority of Middle America would understand.

…that is, of course, except where the people in Comment area on that site are concerned.

Yeah, but a racist image can be a plus in politics.
If you surround yourself with the right people you can enjoy a long ass career.
Strom Thurmond- “there’s not enought troops in the army to… break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”