Never the twain shall meet?

A thoughtful entry from Christopher Simon about the subtle prejudices that still pervade when overt racism is generally frowned upon has got me thinking about this some more. In the wake of the shooting of Jane Creba in Toronto, which disturbed the lid that a lot of people put on their racist convictions -- and I mean racism in the most bloodless sense, "prejudice based on race", not racism in the sense that seems to stifle discussion -- Simon's musings are very germane. I thought this passage was particularly interesting:

How many people of the same people who saw 8 Mile looked at the ads for Get Rich or Die Tryin'and dismissed it out of hand? Looking at the grosses for both films,about $95 million dollars worth. To be fair, although they both star major rap stars, the stories in the individual films are dramatically different. But yet, Hustle and Flow, a movie that hews much more closely to the "aspiring star makes good" plot description of 8 Mile, made even less money than Get Rich. Again, race presents as the most prominent X-factor.

Why is it that pure-laine white soccer moms can love Eminem's violent, sexist and misogynist imagery and understand it to be a cartoon production -- although that's probably up for debate -- and yet cannot apply the same thinking to other rappers, other rappers who are often just as thoughtful and intricate in their lyrics, and less controversial? Is it an ironic update of Langston Hughes' indictment of exoticism in The Ways of White Folks, where it's now kosher to exoticize someone of the same race, as a safe haven from more obvious forms of it? Why is Tony Soprano a figure of amusement to most people, even as he engages in wholesale killing and adultery? Rewrite The Sopranos or The Godfather or Goodfellas with black people and the movies become invisible to the populace at large, or worse, they become case examples of a violent black culture. Somehow, mafioso have become figures of harmless caricature in a way -- perhaps in the way a term like "white trash" is used with abandon -- while black figures of crime are still portrayed as truly dangerous, rather than in equally cartoonish visions.

Even the most enlightened and purportedly rational of people fall into the trap of these small-scale prejudices, prejudices that obviously have much larger consequences. This is what I would term "passive" racism, because it's not something people consciously act on. Someone I know castigated me recently for daring to initiate an online conversation with the word "yo"; his response? "Please stop trying to talk like a black guy." Another example is a fellow who complemented a friend of mine for his excellent English in a job interview -- the friend being a second-generation Asian-Canadian -- and spoke of the "jackass" who rear-ended his car who he mentioned just happened to be Chinese. With these kinds of attitudes slipping out still, it's hard for me to believe that there isn't going to be an effect that, in the aggregate, continues to keep people in weaker economic positions. Whether it's the significantly lesser box-office results of films with a predominantly non-white cast or the latent prejudice that causes someone to pass over a potential employee for hiring, for a promotion or raise to those already hired, this has a strong impact in a society that claims to be fully integrated. At least in the realm of obvious racial policy, like in the pre-1960's segregationist American South, full alternate economies developed in parallel to white ones. In our current system, it's much harder to counter these less blatant forms of racism, stereotypes that have somehow remained acceptably non-confrontational, "truisms" to anyone who isn't part of the race being subtly derided.

Is it even possible to remove this stubborn remnant of racism from society? As we move from isolationist and nationalist societies, to a more inter-mixed global society, where race and culture become an additional attribute rather than the key identity of an individual, will we see this effect fade away naturally in the coming generations? Or is this an aspect of human consciousness that will always exist, due to the intelligence's focus on pattern recognition and forming of stereotypes (initially for informational purposes, but calcifying into dogma even in the face of counter-evidence)? And if this bias is always present, are such hack-like measures as affirmative action the only methods we have to combat the economic consequences of "the X-factor"? And how do we address the issue in industries, like film and television and other media creation, where the old-style isolationist and racist policies have been replaced with often ham-handed attempts to lard in non-white actors, regardless of the quality of their depiction? (For a current example of this ham-handedness, look at Memoirs of a Geisha, which I looked into previously and which Michele of isolato also takes to task.)