Cowards?

Erik Holder's characterization of the United States as a nation of cowards on racial issues has earned some coverage here. Aside from the politics (stupid, stupid, stupid comment) of the issue, I really think Holder is just plain wrong. We may be cowardly compared to some idealized utopia, but I think in terms of confronting our racial past, in terms of seeking out racism and addressing it, we are far ahead of many other nations. In Mexico, there is no legacy of institutionalized racial hatred, so there is less of an impetus to confront racism today, but examples of what Americans would call racism abound. Two good examples: 1) most soap operas have 80 percent lily-white faces; 2) on the Coahuila wikipedia page, someone wrote that 74 percent of the state has European ancestry. Anyone walking around Torreón with a pair of working eyes can tell you that this is flatly untrue, and according to the CIA Factbook, people of predominantly European ancestry make up just 9 percent of the Mexican population. My knowledge of other nations' racism is anecdotal and mostly related to sports, but the sprinkling of high-profile racist incidents that would be unacceptable in the States (in Spain, in England, in Spain, in Italy, and once more in Spain) suggests that much of the world is more like Mexico than the United States.

I don't mean to burn Mexico or any other nation, and most of the examples I see are superficial or ignorant rather than an expression of hatred, but the reason I see all this as borderline racist and Mexicans may not is that the US has become exceptionally astute at reading between the lines and determining racist intent. I don't think that means that the nations without our history and consequent racial self-consciousness are cowardly (it was really an odd choice of words by Holder), but nor is the US, so far ahead of many of its peers recognizing racism, a yellow nation.