Romney isn't the only one speaking in code about race, poverty, and violence. Last week, in an interview with a reporter from the city of Flint, Michigan, which has the highest violent crime rate in the nation, his fellow Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan said something similar. Asked if America had a gun problem, Ryan replied, "this country has a crime problem". When prodded, he went on to say that the best way to bring down the rate of violent crime, in addition to bringing "opportunity" to the inner city, is "to help teach people good discipline, good character". Translation: black people are lazy and culturally inferior, and that's why they commit gun crimes. America's gun violence has nothing to do with lenient gun laws or drugs. It's the stupid black people, stupid!

What is remarkable about Romney's answer this week, and Ryan's last week, is that the two most publicised recent instances of gun violence in America were committed by white men. The gunman who killed 12 people and injured 58 in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, in July, was a white man with a college degree, not an impoverished African American from an urban centre. The man who shot six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, barely two weeks later, was a white supremacist. And yet, when we talk about guns in America, we talk in coded language about white men who hunt and black men who murder.

Romney and Ryan are not the only Republican politicians guilty of it: we've heard others refer to Obama as "the food stamps President" and the "entertainer in chief", both of which play on deep-seated cultural stereotypes about African Americans as government-dependent but jolly minstrels. Even Joe Biden, the Vice-President, described Obama as "clean and articulate," as if to express surprise that a black man could be either or both. And of course, the conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate, the insistence that he was secretly born in Kenya and is therefore not qualified to be president, are one giant dog whistle: this non-white man forged his way into our White House. He isn't our president. He's not one of us. His middle name Hussein proves it.

The United States is possibly about to grant its first black president a second term in office. And yet, in the nearly four years since he was elected, coded racism has become a part of the national conversation like never before. Perhaps it's because Republicans, who still need to reach voters on the right, need a way to talk about race without getting caught being openly racist. Or perhaps it's because, in the age of a black president and all the attendant talk of a "post-racial" America, those same voters are ripe for the scaring, filled with resentment and anxiety that, when stoked, can mean electoral victories for the right.

Post-racial? Romney stood up in front of a television audience of 60 million people and said that gun violence in America happens because poor black single women are bad mothers. He said it as he stood beside the black son of a single mother. Not everyone who heard what he said understood it, but there's a large swath of America that did. And they agree with him. Post-racial, my foot.