Radley Balko has it right:
I don’t deny for a minute that racism still exists in this country… Nor would I deny that it still does real harm to real people, fairly regularly. I guess my point is that it’d be nice if all the energy spent the last two weeks expressing self-righteous outrage over a mistaken comment from a harmless old fool were instead spent on, say, the racial sentencing disparities in the criminal justice system, or the fact that a substantially higher percentage of black men are in prison in America than were imprisoned in South Africa during apartheid.