Competing anti-racisms and the interpretation of racism in the post multicultural era

Few would claim today that the Western state is actively racist. Mistakes and oversights are made, it is argued, but the idea that any government would purposefully seek to discriminate against a given population is usually, in today's "post-racial age," written off as paranoia. We cannot, the same voices add, assume that people who have no right to be in a country, or who are wilfully posing a threat to our security, should be treated in exactly the same way as the rest of us law-abiding citizens. Dealing with such people appropriately is not racism.