Today I watched President Obama’s State of the Union address with a friend who – and for the record, this would ordinarily be irrelevant – happens to be black. The reason this fact is relevant in this case is because – as a result of talking about the address – we were both reminded of how racist we really are. I’ll explain why in a bit, but first, a little background. I’m in the demographic that largely comprises the teabaggers of America. I’m a white male over forty with a reasonable education who is not what you’d call affluent. However, I’m not one of these guys, and I’m generally about as color blind as a person can be. My most overt forms of racism are usually directed at “my own kind”, i.e. white male business people. Partly because they are often predictably sexist, and at least moderately judgmental based on race, if not in fact secretly racist. But also because over the last couple of decades much of my professional work has been with people from various cultures that are not white American. Specifically: Arab, Central European, and Asian. The basis of a lot of my jabs at white business men is the fact that so many of them frankly have no trust or honor whatsoever in their dealings, and always want some kind of contract. They’ll also never put up a fight when you offer to pay for lunch. To me, these are two harsh reflections on a person’s basic character. I pass on a lot of business because of this mentality, but I’m quite happy being a little reverse racist in my work life if it means not having to do business with people who will never trust me. One more piece of relevant background information is that I live in one of the most culturally diverse cities in America, and that is in fact the only thing I really like about this place. Because if I head about ten miles in any direction, I’ll literally be standing in a corn field. And if I head to the house nearest that corn field, the person who answers the door is likely to be in that teabagger demographic I mentioned earlier. So now that I’ve established my credentials as a card-carrying member of the United Colors of Benetton Generation, let me ask you – if you happen to have voted for Barack Obama – the question my friend asked me. And try to be really honest with yourself… If Obama had campaigned with all the same promises and in the same articulate manner, but had been a white man with a name like Bob Roberts, would you have voted for him? When my friend tabled this question, I jokingly put on a Scissor Gang Mafia pose and in my best Ali G voice said: “You only ask me that question ’cause I are black”. We had a little laugh, then I thought about it, and said “I guess not”. If the choice had been between some white guy spewing Obama’s rhetoric and Hillary Clinton, I probably would have voted for Hillary. Which I then realized makes me racist and sexist. I was voting for change, not a candidate, and change meant “not a white male”. I’ve had other interesting conversations that highlight some of the stealth racism that still exists in abundance in our lives; years ago I worked in a restaurant that had a very tight and family-like, culturally diverse staff. One evening someone started a series of questions that went something like “You’re walking down a city street late at night, and a white man in a business suit is walking toward you on the sidewalk. What do you do?” You then take the same scenario and put a black man in a suit, or a young white guy in a hoodie in it, and so on. You pretty quickly realize that no matter what race you are and how open-minded you think you are, you make a hell of a lot of decisions based on race. And unfortunately, this problem runs much, much deeper than any of us in America like to think. Although satire like Ali G or this Onion News parody (video also below) – in which a judge dictates that a white female teen murderer be tried as a 300 pound black man – can put a thin veneer of humor on the topic, the fact is that – running much deeper than the more obvious forms of racism in daily American life – there’s a vast and entrenched subculture that few are aware of, and fewer discuss. I’m referring of course to America’s racist criminal justice system. If you don’t think there’s still a profound race problem in America, read this piece (unfortunately on HuffPo) by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . You may be shocked by the numbers, and her observations about how “Jim Crow” racial segregation laws have been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control, and how we haven’t ended the racial caste system in America; we’ve simply redesigned it. I’ve only skimmed the book, but Alexander’s thorough and academic examination of issues like how America’s “War On Drugs” appears to actually be an intentional tool for social stratification throws a lot of our correctional system and urban crime problems into an entirely new light.