The New York Times Magazine has an article by Matt Bai on race and the race:

The assumption has always been that a black candidate should perform worse among white voters in states with less racial diversity because those voters are supposedly less enlightened. In fact, the reverse has been true for Obama: in the overwhelmingly white states of Wisconsin and Vermont, for instance, he carried 54 and 60 percent of the white voters respectively, according to exit polls, while in New Jersey he won 31 percent and in Tennessee he won 26 percent. As some bloggers have shrewdly pointed out, Obama does best in areas that have either a large concentration of African-American voters or hardly any at all, but he struggles in places where the population is decidedly mixed.

What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other races – sharing industries and schools and sports arenas – actually makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.

Half Sigma responds:

Steve Sailer was the first shrewd blogger that I know of to point this out.

Perhaps, although I think it's more likely that one or more of my commenters and emailers, or some of the bloggers I regularly read suggested the idea to me first. Here, for example, is Audacious Epigone's statistical analysis of this question from Feb. 6, 2008.

Collectively, however, the NYT's designation of us as "shrewd" is something I think we can live with.