Top Highlights

• This ambiguous and nonfalsifiable sense of racial distrust is at the heart of the new reality of race in America.
• Farrakhan and West epitomize “hard” and “soft” versions of what I’m calling racial paranoia: distrustful conjecture about purposeful race-based maliciousness and the “benign neglect” of racial indifference.3
• Racism often serves as a crucial explanation for unnecessary social suffering and governmental disregard.
• Racism is characterized by hatred and power: the hate people express for other racial groups and the relative power they possess to turn that hatred into palpable discrimination or material advantage.
• Carlson is a perfect example of America’s too-quick willingness to dismiss the significance of racial paranoia.