Today, even though "social justice" programs exist as a virtual growth industry on US campuses and many universities have incorporated classes on race and racism into their curricula, everyone continues to be faced with the perception that race is a "controversial" topic that has to be broached with care due to its "sensitive nature". This is even more so in a day and age of nervousness about political discourse becoming "uncivil". In this article, the author opens up the following questions: (1) How can everyone account for the perception that, in the university classroom, racism is perceived as uniquely controversial?; (2) Why are race and racism promoted as uniquely "controversial" topics on American campuses?; (3) How has this belief been shaped by and used ideologically to reproduce the accommodation of American higher education to the political economy of neo-liberalism?; and (4) What alternatives to this ideological orientation in the university classroom exist that more effectively address the basis of racial inequality as a historically shaped social phenomenon in American capitalism? Here, the author argues that the nervousness about race as a topic in the US classroom is best explained with reference to the dynamics of capitalist political economy as a historically shaped social process, of which the generation of class inequality is but one important constant. (Contains 13 footnotes.)