ABSTRACT
For many African-Americans who came of age in the 1960s, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 was a defining moment in the development of their personal racial consciousness. Blacks and whites differ on their interpretations of social change from the 1960s through the 1990s because their racial languages define the central terms, especially “racism,” differently. African-Americans will posit an idea that many whites find preposterous: Black people cannot be racist, because racism is a system of power, and black people as a group do not have power. In the American consciousness the imagery of race—especially along the black-white dimension—tends to be more powerful than that of class or ethnicity. While public discourse was discounting white racism as exaggerated or a thing of the past, the more traditional forms of bigotry, harassment, and violence were unfortunately making a comeback. Such confusions between race and ethnicity are exacerbated by the ambiguous sociological status of African-Americans.
