WASHINGTON: It popped out casually, a throwaway line as Barack Obama talked to reporters about finding the right puppy for his young daughters.
But with just three offhand words in his first news conference as president-elect, Obama reminded everyone how thoroughly different his administration — and inevitably, the United States — will be.
"Mutts like me."
In American English, a mutt is a mixed breed dog.
"Obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me," Obama said with a smile [at the news conference]. "So whether we're going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household."
Benedict Carey
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/07/america/07race.php "Tolerance over race can spread, studies find"
This was supposed to be the election when hidden racism would rear its head. There was much talk of a "Bradley effect," in which white voters would say one thing to pollsters and do another in the privacy of the booth; of a backlash in which the working-class whites whom Senator Barack Obama had labeled "bitter" would take their bitterness out on him.
But lost in all that anguished commentary, experts say, was an important recent finding from the study of prejudice: that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion.
In some new studies, psychologists have been able to establish a close relationship between diverse pairs — black and white, Latino and Asian, black and Latino — in a matter of hours. That relationship immediately reduces conscious and unconscious bias in both people, and also significantly reduces prejudice toward the other group in each individual's close friends.
This extended-contact effect, as it is called, travels like a benign virus through an entire peer group, counteracting subtle or not so subtle mistrust.
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