Of course America is a racist country. Let's not be silly here. Is it the world's most racist nation? Probably not. But racism comes in many flavors and in America it is mostly predicated on the need of people with low intelligence and little achievement to feel that someone in lower than them; Israeli settlers harbor a very different kind of bigotry toward Muslims, based on the conviction that the Jewish people are the master race. But.

I've said this before (I'm saying it again). Bigotry is so universal across time and culture that it appears to be in some way inborne. This is unsurprising; most of our history was in small tribes of hunter-gatherers and an outside was a threat. Hatred of the Other was a survival trait. Millions of years of this sort of "bake it into" a species' psychology.

The only societies that appear to be relatively free of bigotry, repeat relatively, are those that inculcate values of accepting otherness from an early age. And since the USA's nuclear family lets parents set those values, and about a third of Americans are rabid racists, we're not going to get much done there.

No, I sorrowfully think wee need to set our sights a little lower: suppressing racist expression. It was not that long ago that a coworker could use the N on another and suffer no consequences; now he is frog-marched out. That's progress. But we need to go a lot further. A racist rally should draw the Soylent trucks. Racist expression must be so anathema that bigots are ostracized, unwelcome, isolated. I truly believe that's the best we can do.