From CNN:

(CNN) — A white child looks at a picture of a black child and says she's bad because she's black. A black child says a white child is ugly because he's white. A white child says a black child is dumb because she has dark skin.

This isn't a schoolyard fight that takes a racial turn, not a vestige of the "Jim Crow" South; these are American schoolchildren in 2010.

Nearly 60 years after American schools were desegregated by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and more than a year after the election of the country's first black president, white children have an overwhelming white bias, and black children also have a bias toward white, according to a new study commissioned by CNN.

My imagination connected this CNN story with a passage in a NYT story concerning immigrant labor on farms in Spain. Over there, farmers do not hire their countrymen to do backbreaking work but, instead, immigrants. One of the reasons for this predilection is very surprising:

But in most cases, Mr. Cañamero says, that is not why farmers turn to foreigners. He said hiring was governed by a web of prejudices about who are the best workers. For the very hot work in the summer, farmers prefer to hire Africans. For strawberry picking, they prefer women. “It is not written anywhere,” he said. “That would be terrible discrimination. But that is how it works.”

You see the connection? It's not hard to see.
But all of this brought to my mind something else, something in a conversation I had last Friday with an evolutionary biologist. I do not know his name, as we met very briefly at Western Bridge, but I do vividly recall our short conversation. Discussing how I came to believe in Darwinism, I explained that it all happened when I was 11 and had the opportunity to fly from London to Lusaka. In London, I saw very little sun and a lot of very white people; in Lusaka, I saw a lot of sun and a lot of very black people. I then concluded that black skin was clearly connected with Lusaka's climate. Change the climate, and the color of the skin changed. The only theory that agreed with this conclusion was Darwinism.

To this explanation, the evolutionary biologist responded: "Darwinism is so much easier to understand if you travel." And that is one of the essences of Darwinism; it's a travelers view of life and the world. If you do not travel (rural America), and your command of geography is weak (rural America), the theory will be harder to grasp.