It is minimal; but on its own, each case is minimal. Taken together, they comprise a shift in a cultural attitude.
Acknowledging the racial overtones of these issues will
hopefully allow us to approach the problems in different ways. That is, we need to see how the image we have of blacks (or any minority group) can be conditioned by very real cultural circumstances. The emphasis on race that comes from talking heads like Jackson and Sharpton actually does harm to the issue in this case since it attempts to rewrite some non-racial problems as racial ones.
For instance, I am willing to admit that race-mongering has contributed to the democratic effort to sweep economic imbalance under the rug. Walter Benn Michaels wrote a book a few years ago titled
The Trouble With Diversity in which he argued that identity politics (specifically race) were obscuring the more important issue of economic hardship and inequality.
The point isn't to react drastically and claim that race is no longer an issue at all, but to look at the situation through a historicist lens and admit that, due to the treatment of blacks in America over the past several centuries, many of them are isolated in economically devastated communities. Racism may no longer be a problem on an individual level (although there are doubtless many racist whites in the country today), but the entire situation cannot be assessed without recourse to racial issues. The problem, in this sense, is primarily economic, but it feeds into our image of blacks in general (i.e. they commit crimes, they're violent, they don't work hard, etc.). Their economic conditions can offer an explanation for the tendencies that we take to be so natural (or some people do, at least...).
EDIT:
On another note, I've been working my way through an absolutely incredible text that might offer one of the most interesting analyses of the marriage between capitalism and the State, Deleuze and Guattari's
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I know that Dak would enjoy this text, but I also know you have a lot on your plate already, and this book is definitely not an easy one to break into. It took me about one-hundred pages before I finally started getting a working knowledge of the terms they use. That said, the weaving together of capitalism, statism, and psychoanalysis is pretty riveting. One of the overarching claims is that the Oedipus complex (and much of traditional Freudian psychoanalysis) is a tool of the State that rationalizes its edification, at the behest of the capitalism that wants to see its "territorialization" (their term).
Just a few quotes:
Deleuze & Guattari said:
Nietzsche will come to establish the existence of other breaks: those of the Greek city-state, Christianity, democratic and bourgeois humanism, industrial society, capitalism, and socialism. But it could be that all these - in various ways - presuppose the first great hiatus, although they all claim to repel and to fill it. It could be that, spiritual or temporal, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or socialist, there has never been but a single State...
Deleuze & Guattari said:
The historian says no, the Modern State, its bureacracy and its technocracy, do not resemble the ancient despotic State. Of course not, since it is a matter in the one case of reterritorializing decoded flows [of energy/desire], but in the other case of overcoding the territorial flows. The paradox is that capitalism makes use of the Urstaat for effecting its reterritorializations. But the imperturbable modern axiomatic, from the depths of its immanence, reproduces the transcendence of the Urstaat as its internalized limit, or one of the poles between which it is determined to oscillate.
Deleuze & Guattari said:
In short, Oedipus arrives: it is born in the capitalist system of the application of first-order social images to the private familial images of the second order. It is the aggregate of destination that corresponds to an aggregate of departure that is socially determined. It is our intimate colonial formation that corresponds to the form of social sovereignty. We are all little colonies and it is Oedipus that colonizes us.
