[/quote]Is this really true anymore (in the west)?
Or is it an aggressively proffered perception to serve a political agenda?
Unless we intend to only serve the needs and matters of our small communities while ignoring the rest of the world entirely, such proffered perceptions are all any of us have to go on when it comes to matters not immediate to us. And I'm one of those who prefers to give the historical victims the benefit of the doubt until I'm given sufficient reason to think otherwise.
The community that I specifically grew up in has a fairly small black population, though there are substantial Latino and Asian populations, and to my knowledge, there's not a whole lot of racism going on here. We have a sadly substantial homeless population, and I've seen a fairly even mix among them. If I only payed attention to my community, I'd probably think racism was more or less over except for a few old crazies.
Neither of which I trust to be accurately reporting on anything.
That's just complete bull****. One of my black aunts chasing my white mom around with a butcher knife while screaming "white devil" is not a "minor annoyance". No, there's a huge problem with racism among blacks towards whites. They also outcast mixed people, like me.
Both blacks and whites have continuing issues with racism in their groups and need to grow up and move on.
I said "very few" for a reason: there are instances of race-related violence by blacks against whites, and my statement does not contradict that. Therefore, it is not complete BS simply on account of your one counter-example.
However, since it occurs to me that I may not have been entirely clear, the "minor annoyances" was not meant to be a claim that the only type of racism from blacks against whites involved verbal abuse. I live in California, not far from Oakland: AKA, the city where the Black Panthers got their start. Therefore, I also live not far from a place called Richmond: a city that houses the gated community of North Richmond, where I would most likely be shot if I ever tried to go to because I'm as white as it gets.
We can't use our own microcosms to judge the macrocosm. We need to listen to lots of voices, from a variety of experiences. Despite the best efforts of 1950s PSAs, the US is not a single cultural block: especially now that a combination of factors, including the internet and poor economy, have demolished the "traditional" family, we're as culturally varied as Europe. Racism is a major problem in some places, barely a problem at all in others (either due to racial homogeneity or mixed acceptance), and various points in the middle in most others.
My use of "minor annoyances" specifically directed the OP, which was primarily citing verbal abuse. From blacks against whites, that is a minor annoyance; from whites against blacks, it's a perpetuation of the status quo of keeping black people subservient to white people. There won't be any "moving on" from any of this so long as the very concept of race is at the forefront of our social interactions in the US. With the way things are now, we won't reach such a point by trying to pretend race doesn't exist, even if only as a cultural construct.