Instead, she hazards something far more challenging -- pulling us inside their racist minds, each distinctive in its own way.
But if racial subjugation is also an invention — the most powerful and pernicious American tool for turning human beings into things — the fantasy is race itself: people of color are simply people, and, however feverishly racist minds might work to give their fantasy an objective basis, there is no basis in genetic code.
Raphael Ezekiel, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health who studied skinheads for his book "The Racist Mind," said: "They're people who feel very weak.
It's this pretty sentiment that reveals Mr. Richards's racist mind-set, not his flinging the "n" word around in a clumsy attempt to convert his loss of control into a "merely" tasteless and politically incorrect riff.
In real life, as in Mark St. Germain's script, inspired by Osha Gray Davidson's book of the same name, Claiborne Paul Ellis, known as C. P., was a North Carolinian who served as exalted cyclops of a Klan chapter, a man who spoke his racist mind, opening Act I with public praise for the man who shot "Martin Lucifer King".
Sure, the observable difference in skin tone sparks reactions in the racist mind, but racism is much more complex than that.
All of this overt stereotyping makes it particularly hypocritical when Leakes calls out K-Mart Sue Sylvester for being racist, asking Nana to take her "dirty, racist mind back to the South".
Inter alia, he spoke of an award-winning advert (the European/African/Asian/racist brain sizes one) that had ticked all the boxes, but research revealed "no evidence it changed a single racist's mind, but what it did achieve was to make white people feel they were being accused – in the dock for something they hadn't done.
Can we separate Philip Larkin's poetry from the racist, misogynist mind that produced it?
When we think of "racists," our minds conjure up people like the San Francisco police officers who were recently caught using racially derogatory words in text messages, or perhaps politicians like King.
Throw in racist cops, mind-altering drug testing on American soldiers, a neo-Marxist resistance movement, and a rift in the space-time continuum, and you've got an incoherent mess of political allegories fighting with one another for a little over two hours.
