I have said for years that racial bias is unfortunately a part of human nature. As far as I'm concerned, accusations of human nature have no impact. In order for racism to have any real meaning, a threshold must be passed. The big one for me is if people make conscious efforts to put one race ahead of another, but there are other possibilities that I have struggled to explain.
Today, I'm going to try to explain how someone can be racist without the conscious decision. In short, it's racist to assume that your bias must be true of an individual based purely off of skin color. There is a big difference between believing that blacks are more like to commit crimes than whites and believing that someone in your store is going to steal something because he's black.
Like usual, I will forgo the liberal one-sided viewpoint of racism and point in the opposite direction. Whenever a white police officer does anything that could be considered wrong against a black individual, we hear all sorts of accusations of racism without a single piece of evidence that race is a factor. These accusations are generally based on the skin color of the police officer and the victim rather than evidence of racism. The cop is white, therefore he must be a racist. Sorry, but the cop is not the one proven to be racist when we hear those arguments.
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