Sean,
I can't speak for Gib, but I think that his has been an attempt to correct the record, not necessarily to convince those who can't be convinced regardless of the evidence. By the way, I largely agree with Gib and have previously offered my own immigrant experience as corraboration.
An immutable aspect of human nature is that we tend to like and associate with people like ourselves. There probably is not a more diverse setting in the U.S. than southern CA. Yet one of the things that I noticed in my two years there is just how insular and rather impersonal the place is. Making eye contact and exchanging pleasantries is just not done. This was noted in a recent study by UCLA which concluded that in the midst of such a hodgepodge, the various races and cultures were mostly segregated; able to live closely together physically but not socially.
Brad Klein is also right. There is considerable discrimination still, and opportunities are hardly equal. Having spent considerable time in the inner cities of Columbus and Dallas working with disadvantaged kids, I 've seen this first hand. It is a daunting task for many of these kids to survive their situation and pull themselves out of it. I suspect that Brad and I hold quite different positions on how best to help them better their conditions.
I do know a number of white men who hold racist views. Some are reluctant to hire black males in blue collar jobs, but readily seek Hispanics. Not a single one has a pathological problem with skin pigmentation. Instead, their issue is one of culture and values. Is it unfair for them to generalize? Yes it is. Are they cowards as the new AG suggests? Absolutely not. They just have better things to do in their estimation than to spend their limited amount of time on things that a) they are not likely to change, and b) that detract from their ability to make the payroll.
I once played golf with a black man who moved to NYC from the Caribbean as a child. He was a software salesman who travelled the world. In fact, he had just returned from Paris when I met him, having spent a few days as a guest of a French family he met while vacationing in Martinique.
Not being a coward myself (on a race relations or a variety of OT) and playing as a twosome (at Key Biscayne GC) on a slow day, I had to ask him how he overcame racism to become so successful and seemingly perfectly comfortable with the variety of people he came across in his work and travels. He simply said that he never thought in those terms. His single mother was poor, he delivered newspapers and had odd jobs growing up to help make ends meet, and they never had the luxury to think about who was oppressing them. His point of view was that they were not poor, and in comparison to where they came from, they were actually very well off.
He did opine that though he was of similar origin as American blacks- his ancestors too were slaves in a country where that institution was more savage than even here- he was not raised in an environment where he was constantly bombarded by his family, elders, and peers with the highly destructive rhetoric that breeds feelings of inferiority and the futility of action. Somehow he had escaped the gospel of despair and dependence preached by the poverty pimps. He did not express a great deal of sympathy for his American brothers, and was verbally hostile to people like the Rev. Jackson.
The bottom line is that those who long for an utopia where all the races and cultures will set aside their differences, hold hands, and sing "We Are The World" will be terribly disappointed. From Epictetus "He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has." Despite all our shortcomings, we continue to take baby steps, mostly in the right direction.