The world used to be one hell of a racist place. All you need do is go back a few decades to find public pronouncements that today would land you a punch on the schnozz, if not a stint in the slammer.

That was long before we had the sublime comforts of political correctness to protect the shameless white majority from incriminating itself by referring to members of other races in blatantly pejorative terms. Not that this world of ours has cleaned up its act. Perhaps it has simply put a benign and tolerant mask over it, and the face behind the mask is just as ugly as the one we were wont to show without a skerrick of introspection.

Adolf Hitler, among many other millions of garden-party variety fascists, made outright racism pretty unacceptable. Everyone saw where it leads: to persecution and murder. But racism has its soft-spoke relatives. Stereotyping (or, to use today's term, profiling) is its brother; caricature, its sister.