“Professor Devos found that when participants in the latest study were told to focus on the age of each candidate, or on the political party of each candidate, then Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain were perceived as equally American. It was only when people were prompted to focus on skin color and to see Mr. Obama as black that he was perceived as foreign.”

If you want to test your own unconscious biases, here are the links provided by Kristof:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html

http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect/

Will the Bradley effect make a difference in the election? Most people think the economy will trump the issue of race, but for the pollsters, “even in the least complicated years, polling is a recipe with a good dash of ‘Who knows?’”

He concludes:
In the end, we don’t know how the race factor will play out on Election Day. No pollster can look into the soul of a voter; and the verdict cast in the voting booth is a highly personal decision where a whole series of political and social factors have an impact on the final choice. But examining what we do know about voting patterns suggests that fears of racial animus determining the presidential election are wildly overstated. Race may play a factor on Election Day; but then again it may not. And even if it does, it may provide more, not less benefit to Barack Obama.

One of the fallacies this election season is that if Barack Obama is paying an electoral price for his skin tone, it must be because of racists.

On the contrary, the evidence is that Senator Obama is facing what scholars have dubbed “racism without racists.”

The racism is difficult to measure, but a careful survey completed last month by Stanford University, with The Associated Press and Yahoo, suggested that Mr. Obama’s support would be about six percentage points higher if he were white. That’s significant but surmountable.

Most of the lost votes aren’t those of dyed-in-the-wool racists. Such racists account for perhaps 10 percent of the electorate and, polling suggests, are mostly conservatives who would not vote for any Democratic presidential candidate.

Rather, most of the votes that Mr. Obama actually loses belong to well-meaning whites who believe in racial equality and have no objection to electing a black person as president — yet who discriminate unconsciously.

“When we fixate on the racist individual, we’re focused on the least interesting way that race works,” said Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at U.C.L.A. who focuses his research on “racism without racists.” “Most of the way race functions is without the need for racial animus.”

For decades, experiments have shown that even many whites who earnestly believe in equal rights will recommend hiring a white job candidate more often than a person with identical credentials who is black. In the experiments, the applicant’s folder sometimes presents the person as white, sometimes as black, but everything else is the same. The white person thinks that he or she is selecting on the basis of nonracial factors like experience.

Research suggests that whites are particularly likely to discriminate against blacks when choices are not clear-cut and competing arguments are flying about — in other words, in ambiguous circumstances rather like an electoral campaign.

And in my experience, particularly living in the South for a number of years, Republicans care deeply about race and often play their politics to that angle.

Bob Herbert wrote about John McCain using race back in August: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/opinion/02herbert.html

And for the South, you might read the balanced book The Republican South by David Dublin, which argues that economic, social and race issues all played a role in successful Republican politics there.

Race has worked very nicely to split the Democrat block. It helps Republicans that Democrats are so intensely tied up over race.

Still, I wasn’t quite clear on what you objected to. What do you specifically find nonsensical about the statement?

all of the alleles that are common in non-African populations are also common in African populations”

This is nonsensical. Do people actually believe this stuff?