Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America by Stan Goff

Denial supports this “non-racist” racism.  A poll by the Washington Post in 2001 showed that half of all white people believe blacks in the U.S. are just as economically well-off and secure as whites.

But economic and social distance between blacks and whites is far from closed, except in the minds of many white Americans.
Six in 10 whites—61 percent—say the average black has equal or better access to health care than the average white, according to the poll.

In fact, blacks are far more likely to be without health insurance than whites. In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey found that blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites to be without health insurance.

The survey in fact notes that half of whites have convinced themselves that African-Americans and Euro-Americans are educated equally well in the U.S.  The empirical evidence, of course, points to a contrary conclusion.  This misperception by whites is based on two things:  (1) the need to believe that race as an issue is “all in the past now” and (2) the association of middle-class whites with middle-class African-Americans, which lends anecdotal support to the idea of equality-achieved, by exclusive exposure to a non-representative sample of the black population.  Half of all whites believe that African-Americans enjoy economic parity with whites, another staggeringly wrong impression (the poverty rate for blacks is double that for whites, as just one example). more..