Now that Don Imus’ spectacular self-destruction is complete, let's hope the national conversation about racism that we've stumbled upon this week will broaden past the shock jock and into bigotry's deep roots in American society.

The drama of Imus' story has so far followed a sadly familiar setpiece: A public figure breaks decorum with overtly racist or sexist or homophobic remarks, prompting the maligned community’s leaders to demand the offender’s scalp. The villain in turn begs for forgiveness, seeking redemption by casting the slur as an error of judgment rather than character.

If the perpetrator is savvy, as Imus has belatedly tried to be, he or she dubs the whole episode a transformative experience. “Grey’s Anatomy” star Isaiah Washington even went into bigotry rehab following his homophobic outbursts earlier this year.

But, in the end, all of this merely reinforces a narrow framing of racism in particular, and bigotry in general, as a personality flaw rather than a broad and structural scourge.

Tarso Ramos, of the think tank Political Research Associates, has tracked what he says has been a concerted intellectual movement to redefine American racism in the post-civil rights era.

Starting in the mid 1970s, conservative thinkers began championing a new “colorblind” society, in which Jim Crow’s bald, institutional barriers to equality had been removed and the vexing race problem had been solved. Our political and cultural understanding of bigotry quickly devolved from the collective to the individual – racism, Ramos argues, was reduced to “individual acts of meanness” carried out by a few ignorant jerks.

The distinction is a substantive one. If racism is personal rather than structural, then racial inequalities are as well. If oppression is located in discrete, individual acts, then liberation must be, too.

According to this logic, Imus’ antics may hurt black folks’ feelings, but the fact that unemployment among black men is twice that of the national rate is on us, because on a societal level everybody’s got an equal shot. And social justice remedies like affirmative action are poorly conceived, it is argued, because they drag perfectly well behaved white people into the ugly process of dealing with inequality.

Yes, Don Imus must be held accountable – as must the corporations who have profited millions from his recurring, if usually coded demagoguery. But if it takes calling a group of college students "nappy headed ho's" to be a bigot, then we don't need society-wide remedies like affirmative action or gay-affirming marriage laws to level the American playing field, we just need to get Imus and his ilk into therapy.

A version of this op-ed was syndicated to daily newspapers around the country via the Progressive Media Project.