No question that racism has been deliberately encouraged at various points in our history. One of the basic tactics plantation owners used to insulate themselves from the threat not only of slave revolt but revolt by poor white sharecroppers, was to hire poor white men to be overseers over black slaves. They encouraged brutality and a racist mentality, to focus the anger of poor whites on blacks and away from the Southern white aristocracy. It's not really a stretch to say that racism as it's understood today was born in the early 19th century in America.

The pattern's continued down through the years, for the simple reason that it works. The strategy was reborn after the Civil War with apartheid and Jim Crow laws; some historians assert that the Ku Klux Klan was founded and funded by a coalition of formerly wealthy Southerners with wealthy northern carpetbaggers, for the express purpose of mobilizing poor southern white voters.

It's surfaced in modern times. Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign was noted for use of racial rhetoric that sometimes was not at all subtle. Remember phrases like "welfare queen" and stories about black people riding in limousines to pick up their welfare checks? How about 1988, and the infamous "Willie Horton" attack ads against Dukakis?

That kind of thing was visible in the 2012 election too, and it's continued to this day. We have a black President, and the opposition party is made up largely of older white people; what other kind of rhetoric could you expect under those condition? Republicans never ceased their campaign of trying to portray Obama as an outsider, "not like us", "not American"; and the birthers have still not given up reminding us at every turn that our President is black, by insisting he's really "African". Duh.

I would have to say, Jody, that we're currently seeing more of that cynically-promoted racism now, than at almost any other time in our history, going way back to the early 19th Century, to the heyday of slavery.

And my god, we haven't even touched on the religious bigotry indistinguishable from racism being promoted against Muslims. A lot of people think they can spot a Muslim based on appearance; how is that not racism?