Regional Racism

Critics like to paint the South as a hotbed of ignorant racism, and film and TV does us no favors, creating racist charicatures that almost always hail from the South.

But I have suspected for some time now that the seat of American racism lies not in the South, where we have had to deal with the issue of race in our daily lives for hundreds of years, but rather that the most racist region lies to our North, specifically in the American Northeast.

My suspicions have been scientifically confirmed by some kindly Stanford economists, who's experimental paradigm consisted of an iPod for sale in a Craigslist ad.

Over the course of a year, they placed hundreds of ads in local online markets, randomly altering whether the hand holding an iPod for sale was black, white, or white with a big tattoo. Here is what they found:

Black sellers do worse than white sellers on a variety of market outcome measures: they receive 13% fewer responses and 17% fewer offers. These effects are strongest in the Northeast, and are similar in magnitude to those associated with the display of a wrist tattoo.

Interesting that the Northeast, the supposed bastion of liberal tolerance, is also where black people face the most racism.

The research delves deeper into the data, finding even more measures on which blacks are at a disadvantage, but I felt this particular geographic detail to be the most interesting.

[via those awesome guys at Freakonomics]

Bigot

The NYTimes's Maureen Dowd believes Joe Wilson's "You lie" outburst was racially motivated:

The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

Really Maureen? YOU heard "boy" at the end, and you're calling HIM a racist?

It's not racist to call the President a liar when he claims we can give insurance to everyone in America during a recession without increasing the deficit. If you think that's racism you need to stop and check your own prejudices first.