Still, anecdotally speaking, as a Canadian I find the racism in America to be pretty breathtaking. White Americans, whether liberal or conservative, take it as a given that there's always some part of the city dominated by blacks where gunfire is heard at night and the cops are afraid to go. If you probe even a little bit you find that most white Americans, even nominally liberal ones, think blacks have lower capacities than they do. This seems to me, with my Canadian attitudes, like a shocking abandonment of a large part of your citizenry.Wow, so you just did what Americans are always accused of doing - paint large groups of people with one giant brush.
True racism in America I think has shrunk considerably. The problem is that racism is now commonly used to label any not so nice statistics about any given group of people. Years ago when Bill Cosby pointed out that strong families raised better kids he was called racist. He was just looking at the facts that over 1/2 of the single parent families out there are black[1], and kids from single parent families generally don't do as well as those from a 2 parent family.
When it comes to bad areas in large cities nearly every city has at least one such area, although racial groups may differ. There used to be places in LA where simply wearing a blue or red shirt will get you shot. This is not something made up or in the minds of white people. Even when I lived in a smallish city it had streets or areas that even police avoided. Heck, even my black friends avoided the area.
I also strongly disagree that 'most white Americans' think blacks have lower capacities than they do. That's complete BS. I don't know anyone who thinks that, and I certainly don't think that is true.
[1] http://family.jrank.org/pages/1574/Single-Parent-Families-De...