Quick, which is funnier? Brown racism or black racism?

Then again, my neighborhood is at least 60% black, so it only stands to reason that there's more anti-Latino racism than anti-black racism.

Overall, though, I'm far from sure. "Hispanic" is a really broad category, and some of the opposition I've seen to immigration from Spanish-speaking countries is racist, some involves ideas of culture, and others focus on language, overall education level, or other things that are at best correlated with race but not identical to race. At the same time, there's rather a large stigma attached to anti-black racism, and the stigma attached to anti-Latino racism isn't as strong. But that doesn't necessarily say anything about the incidence of racism.

Take my parents, in their 80s. My mother is racist to the core, but blacks (except those with college degrees who "speak well", like Obama) rank right at the top of her hate list, while "Mexicans" (her all-purpose word for Latinos) rank somewhat lower. She hates n****rs, she'll proudly declare (to nearly everybody's humiliation), to anybody who'll listen, but she's not racist like my father because, well, she voted for Obama. My father voted, we suspect, for McCain, although that's one of the more carefully guarded secrets in his life.

But my father doesn't have a problem with race, he has a problem with language and accent. He has the same reaction to a white native-born American speaking strongly Southern English as he does a black man speaking AAEV, poor English from either a Russian immigrant or a Guatemalan immigrant. In practice, most of those he objects to are either black or Latino.

It's easy to conflate the various factors. In fact, it can be a daunting task to actually tease out from a person's speech and actions what they think--they typically find it a difficult task themselves because they haven't been equipped for the task. Sometimes I think society rather intends to keep the tools out of public discourse because it makes for very bad sound bites and makes moralizing harder--when somebody you don't like does something, instead of pondering exactly why, there's a ready epithet.

I mean...if you believe sexism exists, which I know many of us here do not.