The Bigot Inside You...

Was he the reason you voted for John McCain?* John Tierney of the NYT makes a pretty convincing case that "unconscious racism" is rapidly going extinct in America.

In a sentence that would make Malcolm Gladwell tear his hair out--and anyone who's seen Malcolm Gladwell knows that that's no easy thing to do--Tierney writes:

They’ve done this using tools like the Implicit Association Test, which has shown that whites more quickly associate whites with “good” attributes and and blacks with “bad” attributes.” But do these split-second reaction times really tell us anything useful about how people think and behave? As my colleague Ben Carey points out today, there’s also evidence that people’s prejudices can be reduced quite quickly when they spend time with someone from another race.

Heaven forfend! You mean people make judgments on things besides their initial gut reactions? Tierney also points out that Obama got a larger percentage of the white vote than Kerry did in 2004. Kerry! The whitest of the white! The Ivory Soap candidate!

Yeah, there are definitely racist voters out there. Yes, people are still going to make instinctive judgments based on race. But I think most people manage to keep those sort of things outside the voting booth.

Then again, maybe that's just the bigot in me talking.

Link via Instapundit, by the way.

*First, I'm assuming you voted for McCain. Second, I'm assuming you're reading this blog, which is a pretty big jump to make.