If anything structurally supports racism, it's a collection of myths. Stereotypes and caricatures that a closer look at reality tosses to the wayside. Behind a lot of the support for George Zimmerman is a lot of these myths. And it's possible to be racist without realizing it is racism. You just have to believe the myths. Being racist doesn't necessarily mean you're a nazi. It may mean you're wrong. When you refuse to be corrected, then you get into more dangerous moral territory. Then you're not falling into racism because of ignorance, but by choice.

But there's a resistance to the charge of racism that's hard to explain from a logical standpoint; if everyone tells you your shoe's untied or your fly's open, you check. You believe them. There's no reason why you shouldn't. If everyone tells you you keep spelling a word incorrectly, you check. You believe they may be right.

But if everyone keeps telling you you're being racist, you do not check. You don't believe them. And -- if you're a conservative -- the more people tell you this, the more you claim to be the victim of some sort of slander. They're constantly being warned about their racism and they're constantly claiming to be the victims of a massive smear campaign because of it. They refuse to be corrected and make that choice.

The George Zimmerman trial and verdict is only the latest to bring this trend to the forefront. But every time an issue involving race arises, Republicans and conservatives take the side opposite whatever minority is at the center of the controversy. Like Stephen Colbert's "colorblind" shtick, they pretend not to see skin color at all and want everyone to believe this means they aren't racist -- as if ignoring the specific and all too real problems faced by people of color is the very opposite of racism, rather than a hallmark of it.

- See more at: http://griperblade.blogspot.com/2013/07/gop-racism-protected-by-conservative.html#sthash.WAqjZazm.dpuf

In late April in a courthouse in Madison County, Ala., a prosecutor was asked to explain why he had struck 11 of 14 black potential jurors in a capital murder case. The district attorney, Robert Broussard, said one had seemed “arrogant” and “pretty vocal.” In another woman, he said he “detected hostility.”

Mr. Broussard also questioned the “sophistication” of a former Army sergeant, a forklift operator with three years of college, a cafeteria manager, an assembly-line worker and a retired Department of Defense program analyst.

The analyst, he said, “did not appear to be sophisticated to us in her questionnaire, in that she spelled Wal-Mart, as one of her previous employers, as Wal-marts.”

Arguments like these were used for years to keep blacks off juries in the segregationist South, systematically denying justice to black defendants and victims. But today, the practice of excluding blacks and other minorities from Southern juries remains widespread and, according to defense lawyers and a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Montgomery, Ala., largely unchecked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02jury.html?pagewanted=all?src=tp&_r=1&