So forgive me if I don't overlook these issues, if I don't close off my creativity in a garden where I pretend race doesn't matter at all, just because "it's an American issue". I'm too hot-blooded for that, too prone to overthinking to ignore the fact that if something conforms to the usual tropes because it's easier, it reinforces them in the reader, the watcher.
I think Americans would like our racial problems to be unique, because in some way that means we can't help it. I have the same impression of Germans and their lionization of Daniel Goldhagen. (He was a popular historian who emphasized the unique nature of German anti-Semitism.) When societies do that, they deny the actual mechanisms of popularization of stereotypes, political use of stereotypes and systematic discrimination.
As a Jew I was brought up to believe that Polish anti-Semitism was inherent to Polish society. But this isn't true. Poland is just like any other country: anti-Jewish ideas were systematically exploited by certain right-wing political elements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of a certain vision of national unification. The fact that those ideas persist and have currency is a measure of the failure of liberal elements in Polish society to create a counter-vision of civic nationalism. It's not a big mystery. (My friend wrote a book on the history of Polish anti-Semitism (http://unp.unl.edu/bookinfo/5017.html) in which she picked apart the history of how it got this way--I liked the way she doesn't demonize Poles in the process.)
Even though expressions of overt racism have lost their respectability in US society, the discriminatory social mechanisms persist, and the less obvious ideological manifestations do, too. A key mechanism of racism is segregation. There are a lot of things that just could not go on if they were visible to the entirety of the society. On the other hand, if we make victim-blaming sufficiently subtle and omnipresent, then no one sees the racism.
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I think Americans would like our racial problems to be unique, because in some way that means we can't help it. I have the same impression of Germans and their lionization of Daniel Goldhagen. (He was a popular historian who emphasized the unique nature of German anti-Semitism.) When societies do that, they deny the actual mechanisms of popularization of stereotypes, political use of stereotypes and systematic discrimination.
As a Jew I was brought up to believe that Polish anti-Semitism was inherent to Polish society. But this isn't true. Poland is just like any other country: anti-Jewish ideas were systematically exploited by certain right-wing political elements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of a certain vision of national unification. The fact that those ideas persist and have currency is a measure of the failure of liberal elements in Polish society to create a counter-vision of civic nationalism. It's not a big mystery. (My friend wrote a book on the history of Polish anti-Semitism (http://unp.unl.edu/bookinfo/5017.html) in which she picked apart the history of how it got this way--I liked the way she doesn't demonize Poles in the process.)
Even though expressions of overt racism have lost their respectability in US society, the discriminatory social mechanisms persist, and the less obvious ideological manifestations do, too. A key mechanism of racism is segregation. There are a lot of things that just could not go on if they were visible to the entirety of the society. On the other hand, if we make victim-blaming sufficiently subtle and omnipresent, then no one sees the racism.