Most of the racism that exists nowadays is pretty much unconscious ~ which is why it's so insidious and difficult to overcome, even within one's own consciousness.

If this country did not have a long history of racial division, starting with, and rooted in, the institution of slavery, it would not be possible for demagogues to win elections by persuading people to vote against their own economic interests by selling them on the idea that any regulation or taxation of the richest of the rich can only lead to "unfair" favoritism toward some very vaguely defined "others" ~ people who are not "real Americans" like "you and me."

White men in this country are angry and frustrated because the average income they're able to earn does not nearly support the fairly modest middle-class lifestyle that they expect. (Hell, even nuclear families with two adult full-time earners can barely make ends meet; it really takes about two-and-a-half or three full-time incomes to live comfortably these days.)

And where is this anger directed? Against the astronomically paid bigwigs who are exploiting them? No!

For an entire generation (that's a third of a century, since around 1980), white-guy anger has been fixated on the false accusation that all their economic woes can be blamed on the poor people hogging all the money!

Can you imagine such a scenario taking place in a homogenous society like, say, Japan, where there is not "other," no "minority," available as a convenient scapegoat? No way!

Explicit racial talk is no longer necessary. The powerful economic elite ~ the real elite, not the educated class or the progressive thinkers ~ who brought you Nixon's "Southern Strategy" so many years ago are the same guys who sold Bush to the citizenry and are trying to cement their hold with a McCain/Palin administration.

They don't have to utter the "n-word" any more, and in fact have begun to change their picture of the scapegoat population by explicitly mentioning Latinos and gay people while keeping their mouths mostly shut about the black folk. But their strategy would never have gotten off the ground without the deep-seated impact of slavery and racism that has always been the dark side of our otherwise-cheerful-and-equitable national psyche.