Where do white people get off accusing black people of racism?

The most frustrating aspect of the “race debate” that has spawned from Obama’s Pastor Wright controversy has been the tendency of white—usually conservative—commentators to decry the comments of Pastor Wright and other African-Americans as racist. The logic goes something like this: we should judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin; grouping or stereotyping a person or collective of people based on the color of their skin falls into the category of passing a judgement based on race, not on character; therefore, uttering a line like “typical white person” (as Barack Obama recently did) is racist; interchanging terms proves the point—if a white person said something about a “typical black person,” it would be racist so the opposite must be true as well!

Brilliant. If one more person decries the racial double standard that works against white people in a public discourse, I will commit a hate crime against them. Ignoring the fact that the "typical white person" gaffe was a part of a larger and more sophisticated point Senator Obama was attempting to make, let's state what should be blatantly obvious: you can’t just flip-flip ethnicities and then call a statement’s corollary racist. Things don’t work that way. Of course, the statement would still be “racist” in the sense that it is a characterization based on an individual’s race. But the substantive implications, the contextualized reference, of the proclamation would be excised; the statement would be, in effect, rendered functionally moot. True racism—one might hesitate to say meaningful racism—inextricably binds itself to larger societal implications. It is predicated upon a systemic power structure that legitimizes one ethnic group at the expense of another. The idea is that every time a white person says something “racist” about a black person, for example, it is reinforcing stereotypes and social forces that work against black individuals as a whole. Thus, society is justified in decrying “racist” statements, intentional or unintentional, overt or covert, that are issued from white to black people. However, if a black person were to make an innocuous reference to white people (say, referring to an individual as a “typical white person”), they are not somehow perpetuating a broader public antagonism towards Caucasians. No white person is going to be looked at differently when applying for a job or a bank loan or in front of a judge in court because of the accumulated effects of black-on-white “racist” comments that are made day in and day out. So to call a black person racist by the same standards that a white person would be called racist is just stupid. It promotes a game of racial tattle-tale, diverting attention from larger and more important issues that need to be addressed.