Wow, that was racist

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Would racism be important if race didn't correlate with socioeconomic status?

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I think the case of antisemitism makes the answer obvious.

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That's not necessarily clear to me, though it's certainly sort of the opposite of what I meant. Weren't Jews historically a popular target/scapegoat because they were unusually wealthy? Would that hatred still have existed if it weren't for that, or would it have been as virulent? I'm not sure.

As far as the racism vs. ignorance thing, it seems to me like some of the problem is inherent in how you define racism. I'm assuming that to the extent there is disagreement in this thread, it is because people don't have matching definitions of what racism is. Some people seem to be working with a viewpoint that it's not racism unless there's straight up hate involved. This is a rather cartoonish view, in my opinion, and is probably pretty rarely the case. At the other end of the spectrum, I think you could also make the argument that any kind of racial prejudging is racism, in some sense. I don't think this is a useful definition because at this level everybody would be racist. So the actual definition has to fall somewhere in between, though I'm not sure where.