It has never been easy, but speaking about racism in the western political climate of the first decade of the twenty-first century is more difficult than ever before. There is a feeling in post-colonial and post-immigration societies that the blatant, overt racism of the past is no longer as pressing. We hear more and more talk of euphemisms such as discrimination, intolerance or the challenges of living with diversity than of the bluntness of racism. Racism evokes times past: the extermination of the "racially impure", the trade in captured slaves, the lynchings, the injustices of Apartheid... It is unimportant that the legacies of these histories continue to define societies in many areas of the world. What is important is that "we" can relegate these horrors to times and peoples past. Anything that reminds us of them - the chanting neo-nazi "thugs", their excrement through letter boxes, the jokes in bad taste - are written off as ingnorance at the margins, psychologically challenged individuals to be either helped and educated or written off
