This WSJ report that takes up an angle I havent seen covered before. It's honest and (mostly, barring a couple of all too obvious passages) observant.
The article is in the end more about the enduring social segregation between the races, even among those young and highly educated kids whose massive willingness to vote for Obama has been hailed as a sign of a new post-racial generation, than about anything specific to the Obama campaign. Rather, the fact that even Obama's multiracial supporters in the end largely split up by race in their social lives illustrates just how deep-rooted the racial segregation still is. Obama may have a "postracial" appeal that draws very different constituencies to his candidacy, but that doesnt mean that there's necessarily anything postracial yet about those constituencies themselves.
***
On a sidenote, this detail also caught my eye - it's largely off-topic, but the difference in perceptions of what constitutes friendship intrigued me:
Quote:Following a recent discussion in one of his classes about the campaign, in which most students expressed support for Sen. Obama, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a Duke sociologist, asked his white students how many had a black friend on campus. All the white students raised their hands.
He then asked the black students how many of them had a white friend on campus. None of them raised their hands.
The more he probed, Mr. Bonilla-Silva says, the more he realized that the definition of friendship was different. The white students considered a black a "friend" if they played basketball with him or shared a class. "It was more of an acquaintance," recalls Mr. Bonilla-Silva.
Black students, by contrast, defined a friend as someone they would invite to their home for dinner. By that measure, none of the students had friends from the opposite race.
