I got the impression you had misunderstood me, Yuk, and you seem to prefer to continue to, unless you're just being a bit flippant, I can't tell. I tried to to think whether you might have a point, and you may, my comments were mostly in joke form, which I confess to have a weakness for. But I really can't get a clear idea what you think about this question, except whatever it is, you're pretty sure about it, and we're all pretty stupid not to get it.

Oops, it's 'X'enophobia.

Less jokingly, I don't expect cartoony and generalised judgements about people are going to go away, but does anybody think that meaningful connections doing satisfying work might help? At least on the small scale, people tend to put aside biases when they have something else worth doing. So I'm thinking, as a confessed liberal, it may well be we are all one big family, but in the unidealised sense that it's quite easy to use whoever's handy to vent the garbage we bring home from work. Even conservatives might agree that their ideal of a free market doesn't always play out ideally. The U.S. seems to have an awful lot of violence for an inspired free-thinking country with a thousand points of light and ten thousand maniacs. What is it that produces all that rage? Again I think race and other differences may just be the rationales as to who to target, when we happen to need targets.

    At any rate, it might be really naive to assume that racial hatred is rooted in race, instead of simply in the roots of hatred--to keep thinking that it has to really make sense, that there's a real innate logic to it. That's what I was joking about. Maybe I shouldn't be flippant about it, since most people take race more seriously as a question than I've decided to. That's my idea, without the smart-ass reducto ad absurdum format. Naturally I myself form intelligent and insightful appraisals of the innermost character of everyone in the world, as Yuk has correctly understood me to imply.