There's been quite a bit of discussion on Olyblog lately about racism and white priviledge.  There are two things I'd like to point out here.

The first is that there has been a lack of concrete evidence describing the reality of insitutional racism in our discussions.  Educational inequality, environmental racism, white flight, etc have only been hinted at.  I'd like to strongly recommend the book Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol to anyone who is interested in the issue, or who doubts that institutional racism is a reality.  The book describes the current state of segregation in the school system (schools are currently more divided along lines of race than they were before Brown v Board of Education), and provides a wealth of data, case studies, and anecdotal information showing that poor black students get a lot less funding for their education than middle class white students.

The story of East St. Louis (I'll abbreviate: "ESL") stands out the strongest in the book.  At the time that Savage Inequalities was written (I don't know if anything has changed or how), ESL was an extraordinarily poor, predominantly black neighborhood separated from the white middle class neighborhoods by a river.