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At the point my husband and I introduced a friend of ours to Snopes.com because she was spreading such malicious, untrue emails, she said something to the effect that she "stood corrected." Then, we were no longer included on her mailing list for that sort of stuff. But we would bet our lifetime salaries that she's continuing to forward lies and prejudice to many others. And so are members of my family, whom I love, and that's very disturbing to me.
Some here have said that only people already stupid and racist will believe these emails anyway. I disagree. I have in my family a good number of reasonably intelligent, or at least not stupid, people who don't follow the news very carefully. Because they haven't been to a college with a black studies or a sociology major, they have no context in which to understand why Michelle Obama would have written a thesis about black-white relationships. It therefore seems plausible to them that she's got serious race loyalty issues.
Similarly, where I live there are virtually no visible Muslims. Lots of Mennonites, Amish, and the like, but no Muslims. The only Muslim they've seen on TV more than once or twice is Bin Laden. So the Muslims = terrorists falsehood is an easy sell for them.
The relatives of whom I speak are people who want, and try, to be good and fair people. And they usually are. It is their ignorance of certain matters--not racism--has made them prone to believe these emails. And often they do. That's why these emails are so @#$%! frustrating for me.
