Warning! Highly off-topic!
On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote:
3. The difference between racism(e) and racialism(e)
can be a difficult.
British usage treats the two terms as identical, but American usage
makes an important distinction between the two words. Saying that
blacks run faster than whites would be a racialist expression but not a
racist one. The proportion of blacks who have won Olympic medals in the
100 metre run suggests that the statement is true; it's what we do with
that information that makes it racist. (Perhaps if there were more
blacks in the Académie, it might run faster. :-) )
The number of Olympic medals on the 100 metre run is not a very good metric
to use here. There is namely a very large difference within the groups as
well, and if there were (for example) one small black people who were such
excellent runners that even their average runners were world class, while all
other blacks were significantly slower than whites on average, we might still
have the same results.
Analogous, I claim that whites live more to the south than blacks. Proof?
Just check the list of people who have visited the South Pole (note: I have
not actually done it, but it would surprise me if not the majority of them
were Caucasian).
Apart from that, I must say that I do very much agree with your post.
Andre Engels