The tragic shooting death of Renisha McBride in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn Heights is causing the usual liberal sociological analysis about how America hates blackness, and nothing has changed in fifty (or maybe eighty) years. On the Al Sharpton radio show, David A. Wilson of NBC-owned The Grio.com equated America in 2013 with the days when blacks in the segregated South carried a Negro Motorist Green Book for safe travel in the 1930s.

Time’s Ideas blog turned to Noliwe Rooks, Cornell associate professor in "Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies," for an article titled: “Renisha McBride and Evolution of Black-Female Stereotype: Why are black women seen as more threatening, more masculine and less in need of help? Because they're not being seen as women at all”. She turned to MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry for expertise: