Like I've told you before, it's gotta get pretty darn ugly before I even feel a scratch. No worries. I've got no direct experiences in that arena (good nor bad) so it's pretty easy to stay clinical.
Not really sure I want to go too far with that particular discussion, though. It's a very fine line between arguing about racial hypocrisy and being a real honest-to-goodness racist. I'm comfortable with where I'm at, but it would be pretty easy in a heated discussion to fall off that cliff. I've earned enough labels--I don't want to give someone the opportunity to slap "racist" on there, too.
If you're happy I'm happy. Even if I suspect that one of those labels is that the ""d" in dte may stand for 'darth'...
(I'm going to exlore this idea of labeling a bit further below in my response to rith's post, though, because I think it's where a lot of our current polarization problems in this country come from.)
Any subjects dealing with race are hard to discuss without being labeled a racist. I've been called a racist for saying I'm entirely against illegal immigration - despite the fact I'm part Mexican.
It's a sad comment when people have to use such an extremely negative stereotype about anyone simply because they disagree about a vaguely related political stance--immigration is one thing, illegal anything is another.
I've mentioned the phrase being averse to the "hard thinking" before, and while I'm not any better than the next person when it comes to taking mental shortcuts, I'm starting to see a real trend over the last few years in avoiding anything that resembles that (hard thinking) in our public discourse.
Disagree with someone? Call them a racist (liberal babykiller, conservative wingnut, etc.) Everything about you and them is then summed up nicely in one morally superior judgment.
(Yes, I've been known to do this;sometimes it's just fun.)
V7 has a thread going about (at least this is what I got out of it) how much easier it is for people to regurgitate a talking point they've identified with than to examine the point on their own because it's too complex to deal in nuances, and not "snappy" enough. Therefor everything gets boiled down to labels, or as I've also heard it called "bumper sticker" philosophies; something you can sum up in a few words that have a nice ring to them.
Soundbytes instead of sound arguments are what we expect from the media, but too often we get it from everyone around us because they just don't have the time, interest and energy (or sometimes the smarts, of course)to think things out for themselves.
The end result seems to be that our political and social dialog resembles two grumpy old men screaming insults at each other over who ate the other's peas or something.