The elephant in the room

MANIFESTO

I've been saying this for months.

[I]n what could be a historic year for a black presidential candidate, a new Associated Press-Yahoo News poll, conducted with Stanford University, shows just how wide a gap remains between whites and blacks.

It shows that a substantial portion of white Americans still harbor negative feelings toward blacks. It shows that blacks and whites disagree tremendously on how much racial prejudice exists, whose fault it is and how much influence blacks have in politics.

One result is that Barack Obama's path to the presidency is steeper than it would be if he were white.

Until now, social scientists have not closely examined racial sentiments on a nationwide scale at a moment when race is central to choosing the next president.

Well, it's about time "social scientists" examined this phenomenon closely; God knows they've studied just about everything else to death. Perhaps it was too much of a no-brainer even to bother studying whether American whites distrust American blacks: The anecdotal evidence is certainly overwhelming.