The echo chamber - Building consensus that racism isn't a problem anymore...

It seems now that racism has become more insidious, because expressing it outright is now completely socially unacceptable.  In 2008, I went to a family member's new years eve party, and someone  made several remarks such as, "you think it's bad, it's going to be much worse, now that we're going to have a n***er Muslim president!"   No one agreed or disagreed, no one really said anything.   We just simply got up an excused ourselves and left.     As a child, I was raised around such racism, heard these kinds of remarks from family members, friends, and acquaintances quite regularly in fact.  I refuse to  dismiss it and keep the reality of its prevalence a secret.  I don't pretend that's all been put behind us as a nation.   I have no doubt that in all white communies across the nation this is the reality.  It's more insidious now, that's all.
I'm sensitive to victim blaming, such as the idea that poverty is somehow due to the "moral failure" of the poor.  Some people think that discrimination doesn't show, but it does. Bigotry shows up  when someone assigns blame where it's arguably a less realistic prospect, but most convenient to the arguments being made, and where such blame requires the least amount of critical thought, research, and understanding of context.   Bigoted individuals identify others who also turn to these sources of skewed information, and share that information, building consensus and parroting beliefs such as:  "They should all just go get jobs.  Why don't they choose to improve their station in life. "  Another concedes,  "Yes, I agree.  I think you feel the same way I do about it... "  This all may seem harmless enough.  But when some woman you know at a party makes a racist remark and others stay silent or giggle, it is because collectively, there is discrimination at all levels and institutions of society.  This not only allows poverty, it entrenches and perpetuates it.
Biased sources of information that are convenient  further add to a consensus... This consensus empowers a collectivist "groupthink"  and thus very skewed beliefs can become "correct" enough because they are so widelly accepted.    We now have media as a kind of echo chamber of half truths, and "facts" cherry picked from their contexts to serve  as arguments that somehow, impoverished people, particularly blacks, and especially those who recieve TANF benefits, bring their misery upon themselves.  When you readily find information that expresses biased, skewed, half truths and misinformation, rest assured there is an agenda and we should speak up against it.  These are some of the ways that the Jews were systematically demonized until their marginalization was sufficient that they could be herded off for genocide during WWII.
If anyone is still in doubt about the existence of discrimination and bigotry in the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center offers an interactive map of  hate groups in America, which happen to be flourishing and growing at an alarming rate since 2009.