More than a year ago, in response to Joe Biden’s racial miscue at the start of the Democratic primary campaign, I discussed how most white Americans have no idea how to talk about race.

Little did I know, though, that ignorance and naivete about race wouldn’t prevent a lot of white people in the media from trying to talk about it every chance they got over the past year.

And hearing the media’s response to the results from West Virginia last night, it’s clear that all that talking hasn’t advanced the conversation very far. Despite periodic attempts at nuance, the dominant race narrative on MSNBC, CNN, Fox and other mainstream political outlets is that Barack Obama has trouble getting white people to vote for him — and that African Americans are hypnotized by the first viable black presidential candidate and simply will not vote for anyone else.

This narrative reduces the complexities of both white and black Americans — and it validates racism by giving it a back-door entrance into the conversation. It reminds me of those well-meaning white folk who argued in favor of segregation because America just wasn’t ready for change just yet.

Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute, broke it down very well on a recent edition of NewsHour on PBS. In response to the question of whether the culture itself or media is “driving this racial narrative,” Woods provides a nuanced response:

Well, I think, in some ways, both.

You know, when you look at a lot of the reporting coming out of the primaries in the Democratic race, and you see the number of times that we break things down by racial categories in determining how people voted, we are, in some ways, abetting what I would regard as a fairly narrow and superficial discussion about race.

And I think, particularly when you look at the way that we have talked about the demographic groups, the degrees to which we have divided up particularly black and white America in this — in the conversation, we reveal, I think, in some ways, both the media’s limitations in how it talks about it and the country’s.

So, you see a full vocabulary for talking about white Americans in this debate, from blue-collar, a euphemism for white blue-collar workers. We talk about lunch-bucket Democrats. We talk about the soccer mom and the NASCAR dad, all of which are euphemisms in the national discourse for white Americans.

And then we talk about black people, as though they are all the same, with pretty much all the same views. And Latinos and Asians haven’t fared much better. And we don’t talk at all about Native Americans.

It’s funny that around the same time early last year we were discussing Biden’s comments we were debating whether Obama is really black. Whether or not you agreed with Debra Dickerson’s argument that he isn’t, you have to be a little nostalgic for those fleeting moments when we didn’t think of African Americans as some monolithic entity that would vote for the first black guy they saw on the campaign trail.

The reduction of the black voting populus in this way ignores the fact that most African Americans were ready and willing to vote for Hillary Clinton well into January of this year. It was the Clintons themselves who racialized the debate, turning many African Americans off to a couple they had long supported.

And despite Woods’s comments about the double standard, I would argue that the reduction of the white voting populus is alive and well. Yes, we talk the differences between, for example, “blue-collar” and “well-educated” white folk, but those simplistic demographics gloss over possibly the most important division: region.

Juxtaposing some very revealing maps that track voting by county, DHinMI of Daily Kos makes a compelling case that it’s all about Appalachia:

It would be great if pundits and politicos would recognize and acknowledge that race doesn’t appear to have been much of a hindrance for Obama in the Democratic primaries, except, it appears, in Appalachia and in some regions where descendants of Appalachian migrants settled, such as the Ozarks, Oklahoma, and some isolated rural communities on the Plains. Obama doesn’t appear to have much of a problem with white voters. But it seems quite likely Appalachia has a bit of an Obama problem.