This will be brief and less than authoritative; I'm home, doing this from memory, and my memory sucks.
Via digby I read of an Orcinius story discussing the fact that the CBS blog has suspended reader comments on stories about Obama because they are filled with persistent, nasty, racist comments.
It's interesting: if Obama is popular in the polls, one wonders why this sort of vituperative is so loud and common that CBS has to suspend comments on Obama stories.
One explanation is called "aversive racism" (sometimes called "modern" or "symbolic" racism). Follow me over the fold for a little more on it.
Generally, overt acts of racism are frowned upon in contemporary USA. It's just not nice, not PC, or not right to be a racist.
But many people are, down deep, quite racist. (In fact, most of us are prejudiced in some degree. It's a quite natural state of being.) But even those who are really bigoted tend not to show it today because the social norms militate against it.
But what happens if someone who has buried his or her racism is suddenly allowed to show it? What if something happens that justifies the bigotry?
E.g., what do jurors do, say, when a Black defendant is convicted of a crime? Once that person is convicted and becomes "worthy of punishment," the jurors are released from social norms; they now have a reason to act on their prejudice.
And so they do: we consistently see are stiffer penalties for African-Americans convicted of crimes than for whites convicted of those same crimes: the not-obviously-bigoted jurors are given a reason to act out whatever buried prejudice they have.
Now, let's take Limbaugh and his "Magic Negro" spectacle. How does that play into this?
This sort of thing in the public sphere weakens the prohibitions against racist behavior, and allows the suppressed bigot license to act out.
It is dangerous. It is wrong. And shit like that should be tolerated by no society that wants to call itself "just."