by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil LibertiesThis Flickr photo brings to mind a good analogy for racism: grocery store eggs.

Originally, the vast majority of grocery eggs were brown. But over time, chickens were bred to produce lighter and lighter eggs until eventually, they produced the white eggs that most people purchase today. The theory behind this was that white eggs looked cleaner.

While all this has happened, another change has taken place in the egg industry: mass production. Most eggs are now laid by battery hens who spend very short nine-month lives in cages too small for them to turn around in. They eat and defecate in the same place. They don't eat the sort of free range minerals that chickens ordinarily eat. Their immune systems are shot.

Most of the eggs sold today are actually much dirtier than the brown eggs that people used to eat, and created in circumstances that reflect greater cruelty. But most of them are also white, reflecting a longstanding preference for "clean"-looking eggshells.

Racism is a lot like that. There was a time when race probably mattered less than it does now. Early Egyptian art portrays differences between races but no clear hierarchy, and the association between dark-skinned people and slave labor was not clearly made until the trans-Saharan slave trade began in the 7th century AD.

But beginning at or near that point, our class system was color-coded to race. Over the centuries, hundreds of millions of sub-Saharan African emigrants who in many instances would have made great physicians, scientists, and policymakers were denied education and forced into lives of slave labor, while hundreds of millions of whites who in many instances would have been happier with manual labor were educated and groomed into roles that they didn't want and couldn't adequately fill. People were denied choices, denied flexibility, denied social mobility--setting the human race back as a result.

We have ended up with white eggs, mass-produced and genetically engineered to look "clean," that are actually far dirtier than the farm-produced brown eggs that preceded them. And we have ended up with white people, traditionally classified at the top of the Western caste hierarchy, dominating a world that many among them are underqualified to lead.

As long as the racist caste hierarchy defines our culture, we are in effect judging the cleanliness of our eggs by the color of their shells--with results that can be far deadlier than salmonella.

Related: Institutional Racism

by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties

Some people are just beyond reproach when it comes to racially inflammatory statements, remarks, or actions. Or, at least, they think they should be.

A.J. Plaid sees last week's controversial New Yorker cover as a good example of what Carmen Van Kerckhove calls "hipster racism," defined as:

... ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning "ironic" nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the behavior necessarily has to be meant to denigrate another person's race or ethnicity, but there are definitely solid examples of hipster racism out there.

One example that immediately comes to mind would be the illustrations selected for Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There, published by Seal Press, which used as its motif racist sketches from vintage comic books of white men and women doing battle with caricatures of black African tribesmen. Marcotte, who did not select the illustrations, offered a sincere apology; Seal Press, which did select the illustrations, offered an apology of the I'm-sorry-you-were-offended variety. The apology and stated rationale behind the illustrations seem very, well, hipster:

We apologize for any pain or concern these images have caused ...

We do not believe it is appropriate for a book about feminism, albeit a book of humor, to have any images or illustrations that are offensive to anyone.

Please know that neither the cover, nor the interior images, were meant to make any serious statement. We were hoping for a campy, retro package to complement the author's humor. That is all. We were not thinking ...

This 1950s Marvel comic is not an accurate reflection of our beauty standards, our beliefs regarding one's right to bear arms, nor our perspectives on race relations, foreign policy, or environmental policy.

Seal Press had, a few weeks prior, answered criticisms from bloggers of color by explaining that "you all engage best through negative discourse." But these Seal Press editors are people who do good activism on civil rights issues, whose views on race seem to be very 21st-century in other respects. What's the deal? Good question. No clear answers, though.

Likewise, as a former active member of Integrity--a group dedicated to working or the full inclusion of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender persons in the Episcopal Church--I was horrified when the president of the organization included an illustration depicting apes in episcopal vestments as part of a blog entry criticizing African archbishops. The only people who criticized the illustration seemed to be conservatives, who had their own reasons to do so.

And I have noticed a remarkable silence regarding a recent Rolling Stone illustration depicting McCain being tortured by jarring anti-Asian caricatures of Obama, Clinton, and Bush.

There seems to be a popularly held view that if you have non-white friends, come from a certain income class, and have the right political opinions, it just isn't necessary to worry about doing racist things. But the truth is that racist behavior isn't limited to stereotypically "racist" people; "good" people can make the same mistakes, and need to own up to it when they do.

I have no real opinion on the New Yorker cover. I think functionally the racist imagery can only be seen as satirical, but I also think that an illustration that relies on racist imagery, even when used in a satirical context, is not a brilliant thing to put on the cover of a major national magazine.

What do you think? Share your thoughts below.