Originally Posted by kane

My position is that the country is pretty racist, but most of that racism is kept under wraps or is subtle. If I had to put it on a scale of 1 to 100 where 1 is not racist and 100 is terrible racism, I would say the US is somewhere in the 60's. I think we have come a long way, but I think there is still a good, pretty strong, undercurrent of racism in this country.

To me, the majority of this racism isn't someone screaming about it in public or a white person attacking a black person (or vice versa) it is small, often subtle things. It is seeing a couple of black guys walking down the street and waiting for them to move on before you cross the street. It is that guy at work who gets along with everyone, but secretly thinks interracial relationships are wrong. It is the cops in a white suburb who pulled my black friend over 6 times within the first 4 weeks of her living there. She was never ticketed, but she lives in a nice, upscale neighborhood and drives a pretty nice car and that made some cops want to check her out. It is a black person (or person of any race) going in for a job interview and not getting it because someone in charge of hiring feels a little "uneasy" about black people. And so on.

One recent thing that has started happening that has done a serious disservice to race relations is how if a person disagrees with someone on some issue, that must mean they are a racist. For example, if you don't support Black Lives Matter, you must be a racist. If you support Trump solely because you thought Hillary was corrupt or because you think he will improve the economy, you must be a racist. If a black person (or someone of any non-white ethnicity) says something and you don't agree with it, you must be a racist. Using a big brush to paint broad racial strokes does nothing to help race relations.

To sum it up, I think there is a lot more racism than some people would like to admit and there is less racism than some people portray or realize.