(Newser)
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Forbes has tracked down the seller of the controversial "2012: Don't re-nig" anti-Obama bumper sticker, and Paula Smith claims there's nothing racist about it. "According to the dictionary," the "N word" does "not mean black. It means a low-down, lazy, sorry, low-down person. That’s what the N-word means," says Smith, who owns a paintball field in Georgia, and apparently has a very strange dictionary. (Forbes notes that Webster's defines it as "member of any dark skinned race. Taken to be offensive.") She says her online sticker company has stocked the sticker in its inventory since 2010, but sales have only recently taken off.
The 2012 campaign has already seen more expressions of racism, both overt and subtle, than 2008, and analysts suspect it will only get nastier, the Christian Science Monitor reports. The racial messages now are cruder and uglier, a Fordham University history professor says, because Obama is now a powerful incumbent, giving those “racist expressions that do come out an air of desperation, rage, and quite frankly, startling self destructiveness."
