I would disagree as to this being a bad thing. If the racists are coming out of their skeleton filled closets than we can better evaluate the level of racism in this country. Scary that they feel emboldened to do this but it could motivate those who oppose such a mindset to organize and act against it.
A media blackout would be far more disturbing to me.

from AP Top Headlines At 1:04 pm EDT (071010)
by By ADAM GOLDMAN

Rash of noose incidents reported

By ERRIN HAINES
Associated Press Writer

ATLANTA (AP) — In the months since nooses dangling from a schoolyard tree raised racial tensions in Jena, La., the frightening symbol of segregation-era lynchings has been turning up around the country.

Nooses were left in a black Coast Guard cadet’s bag, at a Long Island police station locker room, on a Maryland college campus, and, just this week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.

The noose – like the burning cross – is a generations-old means of instilling racial fear. But some experts suspect the Jena furor reintroduced some bigots to the rope. They say the recent incidents might also reflect white resentment over the protests in Louisiana.

“It certainly looks like it’s been a rash of these incidents, and presumably, most of them are in response to the events in Jena,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists and other hate groups. “I would say that as a more general matter, it seems fairly clear that noose incidents have been on the rise for some years.”….

Speaking of “spatial apartheid”, I just posted this from a DocuTicker/ResourceShelf tip:

The Topography Of Genocide? Poverty In The United States – Spatial Analysis Reveals A Continental Poverty Divide.

Appalachia, the Black Belt, Mexican-America, and the Rez.

No colonization here, eh.

Surprise, surprise.

In the cities, as MIke Davis has mapped, there is the center (now with gentirifciaiton encroachong on and depopulating the ghetto) the inner ring, and the outer ring ‘burbs. Inner ring is now absorbing some Black expulsions from the carceral center, along with a still-segregated Black middle-class, as well as Latin@ populations (creating new contradicitons), and outer-ring is the white-flight zone, where “diversity” is tolerated to about 10% before the taint-reaction sets in.

Interesting too is what I saw in Special Operations — and which Winston and Wacquant nail as the new carceral state paradigm– is the specially-tainted status reserved for Black. If folks haven’t read Wacquant closely, it’s well worth the time.

When you are faced with a system that is determined to do nothing at all good for most people, this becomes a useful and important way to look at certain issues. The New Deal and the laggard,grudging, but undeniable response of the Federal government in enforcing basic civil rights for black people in the 1960′s gave Federal power a genuinely unwarranted credibility in the eyes of many more or less liberal or leftist individuals which has not dissipated till this day, regardless of the actual current and historical circumstances. Some of this stuff makes one feel a faint nostalgia for John C Calhoun’s doctrine of state interposition between citizen’s and an oppressive central government.(George Wallace felt more than a faint nostalgia for this one, alright) The drug laws and Fed medical marijuana raids being a prime case in point. In a more decent Federal system, the Feds would guarantee a minimum of individual rights which any state would be free to go above and beyond, but not below. And states would be able to do as they wished, more or less, to regulate corporations, they are not individuals and have few if any rights.

The Federal role in the destruction of the family farm and the establishment of industrial agriculture is fairly well known, as is the Fed role in promoting nuclear power. Not to mention the federalised National Guard, the Fed role in promoting militarised local law enforcement, etc etc etc

Regarding the “black leadership class” I don’t know if you caught Glen Ford’s Congressional Black Caucus ‘Lawn Jockey Awards’ for the CBC members most subservient to corporate interests. Some pretty stiff competition there……

Lassiter has a very useful distinction drawn as well between “caste” and “class” — used in a very specific way to represent the struggle between the Sunbelt and Black Belt whites for political power in the American South… the Sunbelters being the explosion of Southern suburbs modelled on Northern de facto spatial segregation, and counterposed by Sunbelt whites to the de jure (caste) segregation of the Black Belt, when white and Black were in close spatial proximity.

The struggle was waged not only against the de jure segregationists, but against things like Georgia’s “county unit” system which handed rural whites as much as 14 times the political representation of urban-suburban whites.

With the ascendancy of the Sunbelters, there was a fusion of white supremacy’s practice with the North; and a suburban ideo-mystification of “individualistic meritocracy, ‘color-blindness’,” and class-based de facto segregation” that would eventually tolerate a few of “them” in a limited and controlled form of integration, co-opting a stratum of Black “leadership” along the way.

How else would Bill Clinton — who let loose more misery on African America than Lester Maddox could have ever hoped — still be called “the first Black president” by his African American friends?

This is why white folks can now enthusiastically quote MLK’s “content of their character” remarks and forget everything else he ever said?

I’m writing about this now for the next installment of “Homeland Security” over at IA.

Once this separation was accomplished, even with token integration in the ‘burbs, then the stage was set for the carceral state to consolidate itslef as the basis for a form of ideologoical hegemony.

This is very similar to how Haiti has functioned as “proof” of intrinsic Black deviance and incapacity for self-governance, as described in Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti.

The Topography Of Genocide? Poverty In The United States – Spatial Analysis Reveals A Continental Poverty Divide.