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December 19, 2000, 11:03 p.m. || the problem with psychologizing structural racism

At a recent forum for an exhibit of viciously racist memorabilia from American material culture, a young white woman suggested that these objects --a ceramic black mammy with a breast caught in a laundry wringer, ashtrays formed from the distended lips of wooden Africans, postcards of caricatured black children being bit, eaten limb by limb, by alligators-- were simply a product of fear. "Maybe if whites had been able to get to know blacks better, you know, as friends, maybe they were just scared."

Fear?