I sincerely apologize if I misrepresented what you wrote. I thought you said a good deal about how race is a 'thing' in this country in a way it simply isn't in Europe. To me, characterizing people based on 'race' is racism--it doesn't have to be burning churches or lynching people. I am convinced that racism is what caused this nation dominated by former Europeans to develop so differently. (I have lived my entire life in the U.S., by the way; I'm not criticizing it as an outsider.)

I fear I have misled you about Hofer. His paradigm is concerned with culture generally. I don't know that he has ever addressed racism, other than perhaps in passing. He would be interested in the 'deep' genealogy of the Norwegians who settled in that area. Part of that is people's general attitude towards members of other groups. People prone to be wary of, if not to say hostile to other groups (which the farmer type and the herder type are, in different ways, compared to the forager type) would in that way, to some extent, be more vulnerable to racism. He's not a determinist; he just thinks this paradigm contributes to explaining human relations --as do I.