For those who are not bigots and haters-of-all-things-un-white, racism is not easily understood. To us, it's a question of, "WTF, it's just the pigmentation of somebody's skin!"
To the racist, this means quite a little bit.
I have an acquaintance -- an erstwhile friend, actually -- who considers herself to be quite a worldly and knowledgable woman. Unfortunatly, her knowledge and wordliness is limited to the latest edition of Cosmo which she's too cheap to buy so reads while sitting on a bench in a national book retailer, her father who is likely a member of the KKK or the Confederate Hammerskins, and YouTube and the MSM home page. She's a licensed professional of a particular kind or ilk, owing to five years of higher ed and passing the related exam, albeit her skills in this arena are lacking given her many years at it.
The other day, by way of a slip of tongue (or perhaps not) she revealed to me her belief that Italians and Italian-Americans are not 'whites' -- that is, according to her limited perspective.
As face-value I suppose I could give a damn, but for the fact that she is aware, after some 7 years of our so-called 'friendship,' that I am married to an Italian-American since nearly two decades. I guess, in her twisted world and her awareness that I am inclined towards color blindness, my right to be insulted by her comment was null and void, as any protest from me or the voicing on my part of any indignation from her disreptful view could be argued, "why would you care?"
If I were to argue the point that my spouse's skin is significanty paler than her own with green eyes to her brown, I've then set foot on her grim battlefield of race-hate and color bars.
Susan Raffo once wrote when discussing the situation Italian immigrants faced as new Americans, that opinions about them included views such as:
They come in large and dirty numbers to Ellis Island. Too many of them really. Not all the way white. Certainly not white enough, rich enough, or intellectual enough to understand Faulkner.
My take-away was that racism and bigotry are not based solely on skin color and cultural ethnic differences -- diversity, to many of us. The core belief of the racist and the bigot is the repulsion and hatred of anything that represents change to their homogeneous scope of the world and who is rightly in charge of it, and the fighing -- at any price and using any weapon -- those who represent a change to those beliefs and way of life.
If you can pass the white gate, fine, you're a member of the club. If you're not a WASP, you're hated. If you're not a WASP but are willing to kowtow to their views and their status quo, you'll make a perfectly acceptable minion.