Likewise, when we believe that an individual’s seeming success or failure redounds to an entire group, we’ve accepted a racist idea. These two racist ideas were common currency in the 1990s. Progressive Americans—the ones who self-identified as “not racist”—had abandoned biological racism by the mid-1990s. They had gone further: Mostly they’d abandoned ethnic racism, bodily racism, and cultural racism. But they were still sold on behavioral racism. And they carried its torch unwaveringly, right up to the present.
