We have systemic racism in the US. You have to be blind not to see it. It's not as bad here as it is in many countries, and we don't have the serious levels of anti-Semitism that you see in Europe (can you say 'Jeremy Corbyn'?), but, it's still here. How bad? Not bad enough that mixed-race couples, black men and white women, don't feel free to go anywhere together, including the deep south, although they might want to stay away from redneck bars. Racist violence is mostly confined to crazy rednecks and white supremacists who are perhaps a fraction of 1% of the white population. A much higher proportion of the white population would feel uneasy socializing with blacks, but I don't know how many that would be. 30%? 50%? More? That uneasiness is certainly present.
But -- while the media presents what we are seeing in these riots as a reaction to racism, I don't really see it that way. What I see is a cop-black problem. In one of the most violent riots in the past few years, in Baltimore, everyone involved in the arrest and death of a black man, and the subsequent prosecution of the arrested officers, was black. They were acquitted by a mostly black jury. That's not racism, but it is a serious cop-on-black problem.
There's also a tribal aspect to all of this. Again, not as bad here as in other countries. (An Arab once asked, "How can we be anti-Semites? We ARE Semites." The problem in the Arab-Israel clash is tribal, not racial -- the Jews are a despised tribe of Semites.) And we have tribes in the US, although they are fading. At one time, a marriage between an Italian-American and an Irish-American was considered a disgrace by both nationalities. No more. We have gay tribes, and criminal tribes, and sports tribes, where the interests of ordinary people easily cross racial lines.
I was once a reporter in Minneapolis, which is a very liberal city in the Scandinavian mold, but also in Miami. In Miami, the tribes were intense. There was a Cuban tribe, for example. A guy who was absolutely black, but Cuban, would reject the black label, because that grouped him with American blacks. He would insist that his race was "Cuban" which was all right with most Cubans. A lot of Cubans rejected the labeled 'Hispanic,' because that grouped them with Mexicans who they regarded as lower-class stoop labor. Haitians were Haitian, not black, though to look at one, you'd swear that he/she was black. Some Jews referred to non-Jews as gentiles, but among the reasonably large Miami Morman community, Jews *are* gentiles. People born in Mexico usually carry a large Native American gene load ("Indio" in Mexico), but most reject that label -- they're 'Spanish' or 'Hispanic' but mostly "white" so the census has had to invent new categories like "Non-Hispanic White," because Spaniards are white, and therefore, so are Mexicans, even though they may look like Mayans. When we wanted to refer to the separate communities of Jews and non-Jewish whites, we occasionally would refer to Anglos. All those good Anglos like Italians, Greeks, and Russians.
The fact is, in the US, race and nationality labels don't mean much anymore. They don't make sense. I suspect when we're groping around for what to call people involved in things like these current riots, we should refer to "ghettoists." People who live in lower-class ghettos, and who may be of any race, or mixed-race. Racial labels sure don't refer much to dark-skinned guys who live out in the suburbs, and wax their Corvette and play golf every Sunday.
