It's no secret in the golf world that Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia have never been friends. But the men's adversarial relationship took a racially tinged turn on Tuesday when Garcia, a Spaniard, quipped that he would serve fried chicken if he and Woods dined together at the U.S. Open. After public outcry, Garcia predictably apologized. He tried to pass the comment off a "silly remark" and said that it "in no way was the comment meant in a racist manner." If that were true, however, why didn't Garcia suggest that the two have steak or pizza or fish or any number of other foods unassociated with racial stereotypes. Garcia wasn't simply trying to be silly he was trying to perpetuate myths about black people by telling a tired racist joke.

"The comment that was made wasn't silly. It was wrong, hurtful and clearly inappropriate," Woods stated via Twitter after Garcia's remarks were widely publicized. "I'm confident that there is real regret that the remark was made." Read More...

Jason Richwine's 2009 doctoral dissertation about Hispanic immigrants and IQ has been headline fodder for two weeks now. That's because conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, where Richwine worked as an analyst, recently slammed the Senate's proposed immigration bill as a financial disaster in the making. Because Richwine's dissertation posited that Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. have lower IQs than white natives, critics have accused Richwine and, by extension, the Heritage Foundation of opposing immigration reform due to racism. Moreover Harvard University, where Richwine presented his dissertation, has come under fire for not rejecting his argument as drivel rooted in racist pseudo science. In fact more than 1,200 Harvard students have urged the Ivy League university to repudiate the dissertation, according to the Boston Globe.

Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argued Wednesday that repudiating the dissertation would represent a violation of academic freedom, while Zack Beauchamp of Think Progress argues that Richwine's dissertation indeed lacked merit. Jacoby says that Richwine's critics don't care that "nothing in that dissertation expressed the slightest racial animosity, or that Richwine's data appeared unassailable, or that his former Harvard faculty advisers confirmed that he was a careful and honest researcher." How does arguing that one group of people is intellectually inferior to another group of people not constitute racial animosity? Furthermore, Richwine's dissertation is strongly problematic because it fails to capture exactly who Hispanics are. As Beauchamp pointed out: Read More...

Is it possible to determine the world's most racist countries through a single poll? Not likely. But the World Values Survey set out to do just that by asking citizens of more than 80 different nations to "identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors," the Washington Post reports. Race was among a list of qualities respondents could choose from to rule out people as neighbors.

"The more frequently that people in a given country say they don't want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society," according to the Post. So which countries topped the list of world's most racist societies? India, Jordan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong turned out to be the least racially tolerant nations on Earth, according to the survey results. Read More...

The problem with white America, according to attorney Dawn Cutaia, is that "we are racist and we don't even know it." Cutaia, who's white herself, says in an opinion piece for the York Daily Record that many whites have the impression that they have to belong to the KKK to be racist. By denying the prevalence of racism, however, whites have done a disservice to America, Cutaia asserts.

"Slavery may have been outlawed 150 years ago, but the Civil Rights Movement was less than 50 years ago," Cutaia points out. "Fifty years ago blacks were still sitting in the back of the bus, drinking out of separate water fountains, being sprayed by fire hoses for peacefully protesting, and living in extreme poverty with substandard education." Read More...