I listened to the grownups in my family speculating on the rampant and violent racism in American society, particularly in the South. "We had slavery in Cuba too, and we [white] Cubans are also racist, but its not the toxic and lethal racism that we see here in the USA. We may choose not to mix socially with Negroes, but we have no desire to hurt them or hate them."

I think your last post nailed it. In Cuba, the blacks were a substantial portion of the population, not just a minority, and there was an enormous mulatto population that spanned both the black and white communities. There really was no minority or majority, and no hard separation between the races. It was a great racial Venn diagram with a huge overlap.

I heard the adults in my family speculate that there would be racial violence in America because the black community could not forever endure the oppression they were subjected to--sooner or later they would revolt and the backlash from the whites would be ruthless. As it turns out, this never happened, and we got through the civil rights 1960s fairly peacefully. But I can see now, as you point out, that the backlash is still there, although it has manifested itself in a very different way--not as outright violence, but as ideological and cultural rigidity. Conservatives very often ARE racist, not necessarily because they have any inherent hatred or dislike of other races, but because since the Civil War race has been the boundary that split the country into competing cultural groups. Even if we mix racially (through immigration and intermarriage) so that we are all one color, there will still be two Americas divided along what used to be a color line that may be no longer visible, if not forgotten altogether.

There is historical precedent. The British Isles used to be Romano-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, and England itself used to be split between an Anglo-Saxon peasantry and a Norman French aristocracy. Those ancient divisions still survive today in the class structure and economic distribution of wealth and of political power.

Its funny, I used to be pretty proud of my country for making the transition from segregation to integration relatively peacefully. But I can see now the process has not fully run its course. Its funny also that although many, if not most, of my white [Anglo] friends were not necessarily racist, they seemed to be completely unaware of this dynamic and how it affected them. This process was going on all around them, and they seemed to be cheerfully clueless of its origin or its source. The racism has morphed into cultural and religious differences, political and ideological ones, reinforced by economic class.

"They fear becoming a minority because they fear they will be treated as they have always treated minorities themselves." We saw this happen in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and we see it happening all over Africa today. There's no fundamental reason it can't happen here too.