Check out this post from Ed Brayton on a definition for "cultural racism" from the Seattle Public Schools:
Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.
As someone who isn't "flesh colored" (see picture to your left, you know you got to love the hot chocolate!) and has lived in the Pacific northwest of the United States for over 15 years, I will weigh in here: 1) On average, cultures where the majority of people are phenotypically white are more individualistic than those where the majority of people are non-white. See The Geography of Thought. 2) Just because one can generalize about a particular group does not mean that that all members of that group are going to follow that characterization. Culture exists only in the collective expression of individual choice, it does not exist a priori "out there" as a separate, living thing worthy of respect or reverence. 2,200 years ago the Greeks viewed the Roman republicans as a stoic and emotionally controlled folk. Today, few would assert that about the citizens of modern Rome. in 1550 the Prussian march was characterized by backwardness, inefficient and corrupt rule by the Teutonic knights. That changed after the arrival of tens of thousands of Huguenots (who brought skills and capital) after 1700 and the reorganization of the Prussian state under Frederick the Great. The point is that culture changes, and just as expectation varies as a function of time, so it varies as a function of individual. Generalizations are part and parcel of the human perception of the world around us, but I generally take issue when people refuse to abandon generalization when confronted by individuals or phenomenon which countervails their theoretical expectation. Perceptions of cultural difference elide over non-trivial intracultural variance (the generalizations are roughly true, but they are not universally appropriate for government). Though South Asian culture is fairly characterized as spiritual and otherworldly compared to Chinese culture, the Carvaka movement prominent before 1000 CE was composed of atheistic materialists. Even though Chinese culture did not conceive of a personal omni-God (Shang Di was a ancestral godling, Tien was impersonal), the idea of the deity in the philosophy of Mo-Tzu came close to this idea. The "unlike" lumps of discordance are reproduced in legion on the granular level of the individual . Though my skin is brown (genetically South Asian) and my family is Muslim, I feel far more cognitive kinship with the intellectual-philosophical traditions of the West and China than those of the Islamic world or India. This is not that unusual, even if it isn't typical. Finally, I am probably a "cultural racist." There is a time for epoche, and there is a time for living. In the world of life I am strongly biased toward individualism, a minimal level of "future time orientation," secularism, equal rights before the law for females, etc. Across the cultures of the world there are positive and negative correlations on all these traits. I am predisposed positively toward those cultures which promote these values, and negatively toward those which do not, and, I believe that it probably best for our republic if particular core values (equal rights before the law, separation of church and state, and to a lesser extent primacy of individual choice over familial obligation) were promoted by the institutions of the state.
