Everyone's a Little Bit Racist

Sitting in the mall today waiting for some shopping to finish I had a few minutes to think about the statement 'Everyone's a little bit racist.' It's an idea that many people have grown to accept, and popular culture is perpetuating in the musical Avenue Q, which I haven't seen but which has a hilarious soundtrack--including the song 'Everyone's a little bit racist.'
But it's a false idea which misinterprets the meaning of the word racism and thus breeds an unintellectual misunderstanding of cultural bias.
For example, this summer I lived in the Bronx. One night I was walking down dark alley and I felt a slight pang of fear when I saw a burly Black thug walking toward me. Some people jumped to the conclusion that that meant I'm a little racist.
No, it doesn't. What it does mean is that I lived and worked in the Bronx all summer, and knew a little bit about the area. People are stabbed there every month for intruding on drug deals, looking at people wrong, messing with gangs, or just in random muggings. It happens that most of the criminals are either Hispanic or Black.
If I were a little bit racist I would say, 'Of course the criminals are Hispanic or Black, Hispanics and Blacks are violent and deviant BECAUSE they are HIspanic and Black. It's in their Blood.' Racism means attributing certain characteristics to a person because of their race. Then, whenever I saw one of these people I would be scared a little BECAUSE OF THEIR RACE.
But I wasn't scared of the burly thug because of his race.
I would have been scared if he were Black, Hispanic, White, Asian, Polish whatever. I was scared because he was a thug, and thugs in my neighborhood were generally poor and generally involved in illegal, and often violent, activities.
That's the misinterpretation. We often attribute our feelings of insecurity to RACE instead of to the contextual, environmental and socio-economical factors of the situation.
There were a lot of Black criminals in my neighborhood. Not because Blacks are inherently more criminal than whites, but because history has placed more Blacks than it has whites in crime inducing contexts.
Overcoming this misinterpretation of our feelings and misunderstanding of what Racism means is a major step in coming to grips with our personal conflicts and insecurities in our race-charged culture.