Unless I've missed something, no one is bothering to define "racist" or "racism", so that tends to make anything one has to say about it more or less right and more or less wrong, depending on what one's own definition of racism is. Just off the top of my pinpointed head (where not much can balance without falling off), I consider the term to refer to any kinds of distinctions regarding the value of human beings based on "race" (whatever that is defined as in the society under consideration, since it's a social construction, not a biologically definable category). So....I think racism is pre-eminently a characteristic of a society, and all members of that society are inculcated, influenced, enlanguaged, and enthoughted by it, whatever their moral and ideological persuasions. (I'm old enough to make up my own words, goddammit!). So....if you are born into and raised by a racist society (and who isn't?), you share in those sensibilities one way or another. Does that make you a "racist"? The question is silly. It makes you a participant in a racist society, and to some extent you embody those values in your thinking, willy nilly. It's what you do with it, how you respond to it, that matters for the real issue of human redemption. When I was active in the civil rights movement in the 60s, as rabid a white anti-racist as you could find, brought up from the cradle by left-wing anti-racism radicals, I was deeply conscious at every moment of my racist instincts, the huge package of prejudice with which I responded to people reflexively. I considered these to be poisonous elements in my consciousness, deeply embedded in my bones, and that was one of the major motivations I had to try to overcome it in every way possible by changing myself and my society. Unhappily, I only succeeded partially on both counts. Same for Twain, I'd submit. Just my 2 centavos. Ben Benjamin N. Wise, Ph.D. Keene State College