These are thoughtful and important points. My working definition of racism is the belief that one race is inherently superior to another.

Now the catch is that there are different levels of belief. There’s belief as an unconscious assumption. You don’t think it, you certainly don’t say it, but it shows up as a series of actions or preferences — none of them outright hateful or malicious but still based on the gut feeling that something that might be a flaw in a particular individual probably generalizes to all members of that individual’s race. Someone drives past with loud rap music playing: “That’s so typical!” We are raised to categorize and often we overgeneralize when we do so. I don’t have any evidence, but it’s my belief that most white people are raised / socialized with negative gut feelings about black people that they probably aren’t aware of. As we mature, we shed many of our prejudices because we notice that they don’t reflect our real-world experience. These unconscious assumptions are not good (not true), but I wouldn’t say something like “All white people are racists” if that meant ignoring the differences between this group and the overtly hateful racists. I could empathize with the people raised to have unconscious racist feelings. That’s how I grew up, and as I grow older (ideally wiser), I find myself shedding stereotypes and overgeneralizations based on race.

At the opposite extreme are the hateful, spiteful racists. They want to do harm to black people because they think black people deserve it. As long as they’re doing this, I can’t empathize with them. And for some reason, they seem to think it’s fine to post their racist views on social media, or to go up to strangers on the street and yell racist epithets, or call the police or whatever.

In between these groups (and the boundaries are seldom crisp) are people I called “polite racists” in an essay here. These people vote, purchase, make laws that they know will unfairly harm an entire race of people, but they would never acknowledge that they’re doing so (probably not even to themselves — but it’s still a conscious pattern of behavior). They think of themselves as in the middle between blacks (whom they consider wrong as a race) and white supremacists (whom they consider tacky). MLK referred to them as white moderates, and he considered them more dangerous to the cause of civil rights than the overt racists with their police dogs. These are the people defending Confederate statues in order to “preserve our history.” They are the bulwark of systemic racism. Quite frankly, I can’t empathize with this group either, and I agree with Dr. King that they’re the most dangerous of all. But hopefully, we can convince them to examine their beliefs and change them to be empathetic themselves. I don’t think we’ll have much luck with the supremacists.