The new PBS documentary American Denial picks up this decades-old question and asks it again: how in the world can a country that claims to cherish freedom and fairness treat black people so terribly?

The answer, in my opinion, is that many Americans do not truly believe that black people are fully human. Obvious from the way arguments are framed on the right. Remember all the testimony from Darren Wilson about the huge hulking monster that was about to attack him? The unstoppable monster that had to be shot many times? The huge monster was actually 1 inch taller than Darren Wilson but the point here is that to Darren Wilson, Mike Brown represented all the scary black men that populate the nightmares of racists.

There are many books that have been written about the supposed innate superiority of the white race over the colored races. That these ideas have no biological and/or genetic basis does not matter. The whole point is to reinforce the idea of American Exceptionalism. American Exceptionalism of course stands for White Exceptionalism.

This may sound unrelated, but many uneducated white people deny the idea of evolution. Why? Because anthropologists place the origin of the human species in the Rift Valley. Where is the Rift Valley? In Africa! To admit the existence of Evolution is to admit that the Bible is not literally true. That means science trumps belief. That means all hominids come from Africa. The place where black people come from. That means we really all are brothers and blacks cannot be 3/5ths human.

The horror of it all for racists and the reason they must deny science.

They are racist and therefore the problem.

And we all know republicons are never ever ever wrong about anything.

believes otherwise is an idiot.

I don't wish to get flamed, but I also do not believe that all criticism against President Obama is based on race, even if it comes from the right.

just joking... at lest I think.

I'm sure many on the right believe their own lies about Obama. But the OP did hit spot on with the unconscious bias. Its how we are indoctrinated into society from day 1 as babies and children. Being conditioned to think the white baby is better because it is clean, pretty and smart, while black babies are the opposite. Same with the word we now use for homosexuals, gay. It used to be it meant happy, now it means homosexual and we have been conditioned to see homosexual as bad.

The hard part is this is not something that just started. It was done for generations. So trying to explain that to wing nutters doesn't work out well because they will tell you it is how I was raised, and how my parents and their parents before them. It means to them everyone in their family for generations was wrong and they really are racists and bigots. Most people don't want to admit that.

Plus it means they are no smarter then the next person as they fell into the same trap as everyone else. So in their little minded worlds, they can't possibly be wrong.

and came up with this....

By and large, white and black Americans don't tend to live in the same neighbourhoods, go to the same bars and clubs, or socialise with one another. For a lot of white Americans, it's a case of "out of sight, out of mind". And there are people who see things like higher rates of black poverty as being indicative of a lack of initiative (but will tell you that they aren't racist for saying so), and see black incarceration rates as evidence of black criminality (and will also tell you they aren't racist for saying so). And we have a black president, now, so racism is over! Or something. But no, the USA is still an extremely racist country in quite a lot of ways (both on a structural and an individual level).