A Racist Nation

The AP reported over the weekend that as compared to 2008, Americans are overall more racist.  Read this:

WASHINGTON — Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not. 

Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some people’s more favorable views of blacks.

Obviously, with the tide turning toward Romney, the press had to figure out some way to explain it, any reasonable explanation to the contrary notwithstanding.  The implication of this report, of course not said explicitly, is that any opposition to the president, whether consciously or not, was due in part to racism.  

But at a closer inspection, the data doesn't even merit the supposed fact of increased racism.  Aaron Goldstein takes a look at the data in the report:

The AP has come to this conclusion in part because in one question only 24% of respondents liked Blacks "a great deal" as compared to 31% in 2010. But I would point out that 45% they "neither liked or disliked" Blacks as compared to 40% in 2010. I would interpret that data and conclude that an increasing number of people do not take a person's skin color into consideration when determining if they like or dislike someone.

So racism is now something akin to the colorblind view of the Constitution, which was famously explicated by Justice John Marshall Harlan in his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson:

But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color- blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved.

And was repeated by Martin Luther King:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.