Big Robb I think you have a good outlook on the subject. I've tried to reason with a lot of people on this board about generalizing, but I get nowhere.
White racism runs deeper then a lot of you might know. Mista Sinista is correct, there is not a racist in the world that has a justifiable reason for their beleifs. And just to show how deep the roots of white racism runs, here is an example of white people trying to *find* a reason to justify their racism. They took it to a scientific level (This is a sensetive article, but awareness is the issue at hand):
"In the late 1840s, Dr. Samuel Cartwright published a study in a southern Medical Journal intended to report on the "diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro race" (Tucker 13). Cartwright, mimicking the type of scientific rhetoric that was only then beginning to gain credence and popularity, and foreshadowing the type of discourse that underlies much of racist ideology even today, theorized that the black skin of African-Americans in conjunction with a deficiency of red blood cells led to smaller brain sizes in blacks, which resulted in both less intelligence and less morals. This theory led Cartwright to postulate that slavery was a cure for the physiological illnesses of blacks, because it "makes the lungs perform the duty of vitalizing the blood more perfectly than is done when they are left free to indulge in idleness" (14).
This was only the first in a long line of racially-motivated "scientific" studies. Throughout the entire second half of the 19th century, it was common to see numerous publications referencing differences in skeletal structure, facial features, and physical ability as "causes" behind the so-called racial inequality. Researchers mixed pieces of Darwinism with anatomy studies and phrenology to create tables of correlation between intelligence level and scientific composition. Aimed initially at blacks, the scientific method was also widely used to discuss how new immigrants, especially Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe, had a "higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do the older stocks" (Larson 101). If they had actual "proof" of White, American superiority, they could rationalize not only their own personal bigotry, but also governmental discrimination in terms of voting rights, job availability, and neighborhood segregation.
"Scientific Racism" played a prominent role in the foundation of the Harvard Immigration Restriction League in 1895. Supported by many of America's upper-class males, including Carnegie and Rockefeller, this league perpetuated the application of "science" to racially-motivated development of eugenics, proposing that because blacks, Jews, immigrants, and other racial "undesirables" were scientifically inferior, it was necessary to utilize "scientific" practices such as sterilization and abortion to promulgate what they held to be a superior race. While this in itself led to a number of atrocities at the time, it set an even more horrendous precedent for Nazi Germany and other scientifically-based racial purity movements."
So in the early days whitey went so far as to run expierements on black people to find any flaw they could, and exploit these differences as rationality for racism.
