"the bigot in your brain"

a great article from scientific american---pretty much catches all that i have ever thought about race, although the actual studies that back it all up are fascinating---and i know exactly what jesse is talking about:

"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.

while you are at it, you might as well read another one in the same vein: "how harvard students perceive rednecks"