One of the most honest confessions I've personally ever heard was from an Italian priest, who matter-of-factly echoed Obama's own admission that racism is in our common DNA: "We all have our deep prejudices...we are profoundly racist."
For years, too many conservative Republicans have been in denial that racism still exists in America - and that blanket denial is reaching the point of absurdity.
But that's largely because, for years, the liberal consensus in our popular culture has elevated racism to a particularly horrible sin - way out of proportion to its true degree of detriment to personal character in the overwhelming majority of cases.
It shouldn't be particularly hard for a typical white conservative to just utter a common self-observation: "I'm selfish like everyone else and yes, I have a tendency to stick with my own kind and have suspicion of those who look different from me; and yes, sometimes I feel good about myself holding other groups in contempt; but I know this is wrong."
It's a lot harder to do this, though, when the liberal mainstream media strictly enforces a code of ethics that all but character-assassinates the very hint of bigotry.
When conservatives (white or otherwise) deny the overwhelming evidence of the continued existence of racism, minorities and liberals should recognize that it's predominantly (by no means universally) a backlash against the overwhelmingly one-sided magnification of racism as a uniquely terrible evil among other human weaknesses all in itself. Somehow the words "Hitler" and "Nazi" are ever lurking around the corner - as if there's no line between harboring bigoted thoughts and opinions and actually acting on them in the most extreme ways.
When both sides focus exclusively on the mutual accusations and denials that divide them, they'll never see their own deeply internalized falsehoods which rob them of peace, not just with others, but ultimately with themselves.
A little self-accusation can sometimes go a long way.
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