White people, of course, having never experienced the business end of institutionalized racism, can only achieve an approximate understanding of it. Fortunately, Tim Wise is on the scene to help. Here's Wise on how racism is driving the opposition to health care.

"You know full well that no one is talking about wanting to go back to the days of segregation."

Well, no, I don't know it. I don't know that at all, seeing as how so many of the tea-bag set and anti-health care folks make "taking their country back" one of the most prominent lines of their vocalized outrage. What does that mean, coming from people in their 60s and 70s, for whom the America of their youth was indeed a white supremacist place? A place where white hegemony could be taken as a given, something that could be presumed in perpetuity? What does it mean when someone says that they want to go back to the country the way the founders envisioned it, as many have also explained at these rallies? After all, they envisioned a white republic. They envisioned and sought out the extirpation of indigenous peoples, most believed in the enslavement of African peoples, and none truly believed that blacks should be treated as equals.

-A