A primer on how not to respond to accusations of racism

The Nation scribe and MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry set off a firestorm of criticism with her recent column in which she argued that structural racism, in which white liberals unconsciously hold a black politician to a higher standard, might doom President Obama to a single term. The responses from whiteliberals ranged from scathing to outright racist, and had one thing in common: many people took Harris-Perry's structural analysis as a personal accusation of racism and responded to it as such (and too often in kind).

Since there were so many responses to Harris-Perry's thesis -- and several were quite long and filled with SAT-words -- we consolidated them all into a short, one-minute video for our readers:

[Image via the White House Flickr, Creative Commons licensed]