ABSTRACT
On an hourly basis, disquieting US manifestations of systemic racism—for example, many police shootings of unarmed black men, women, and children; widespread anti-immigrant discrimination; and major mismanagement of Native American affairs—are conspicuous in the contemporary United States. Local, state, and federal governments still enforce well-institutionalized racist laws, policies, regulations, and cultural practices. Major and unjust socioeconomic and other resource inequalities between whites and most groups of color persist across the country. The US political economy constantly perpetuates essential elements of past systemic racism into the present day, and its major institutions generally remain controlled by many white agents of racial discrimination. Negative social psychological realities shaped by racial matters span the society, such as white psychological instabilities and pathologies witnessed in white rage and murderous inclinations directed at black Americans and other Americans of color perceived as “taking over our country.” Millions of negative racist comments online and offline about President Barack Obama by many whites have demonstrated that anti-black framing and dehumanization are still prevalent, as is the extensive negative framing of people of color. Systemic racialized violence by local officials, including police brutality, has become part of everyday life for most counties, towns, and cities. Since World War II, recurring wars against people of color overseas are standard operating procedure for a still imperialist and militarily 282aggressive United States. Much of the population, steeped in years of white framing and well accustomed to the operations of systemic racism, has become apathetic or feels helpless in regard to such racialized realities as the massive US prison-industrial complex and secretive US detention centers abroad where US operatives torture non-Westerners, usually to maintain control of the international economy and local or global politics.
