Our country has found its poster villain.

We shudder to contemplate the ghastly schemes he might next enact, the whimsical yet deadly malice behind his every move. Still we laugh: at his antics, one-liners, and disarmingly simple slip-ups.

President Bush roughly fits this bill, but I'm referring to someone whose villainy Americans are really concerned about: the Joker.

Has there ever been a starker personification of the national tendency to excuse serious offenses as mere jokes-misunderstood or antisocial pranks?

Many real public figures pass off their misdeeds as humor with as much aplomb as Batman's latest rival. Indeed, our media and politicians increasingly won't touch highly controversial subjects without a ten-foot jester's pole.

Particularly cagey have been recent efforts to stir the specters of racial and cultural prejudice in this country.

They range from broadcast journalists' goofy habit of mixing up "Osama" and "Obama" - still common 17 months after Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the top office in the nation - to less abashed "jokes" about his race.

Since he became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, our own aspiring guardian-protector has faced comedy as toxic as the Joker's tricks.

At the Texas Republican Party convention in June, a vendor sold pins that read "If Obama is President. will we still call it The White House?"

When The Dallas Morning News asked whether the buttons were intended to be offensive, the vendor responded "We're into humor, not racism."

To "stimulate an examination of Sen. Barack Obama's foreign policy" last week, South Carolina State Senator Kevin Bryant posted photographs of Obama and Osama bin Laden on his Web site with the caption: "The difference between Obama and Osama is just a little B.S."

When a Huffington Post reporter asked Bryant whether he thought the image was appropriate, he explained that "blogs are for satire and whatnot.. It's similar to the New Yorker picture."

But The New Yorker depicted the Obamas as terrorists to parody the kind of behavior that Bryant and the button vendor actually display. It failed to effectively execute that parody because it restated the content of the prejudice without showing why that content was so ridiculous.

A New York t-shirt designer whipped the same mis-humor into publicity earlier this month.

He sent The New York Metro an almost certainly fictitious press release, reporting that a woman was assaulted by four black girls for wearing one of his t-shirts that read simply: "Obama is my slave."

The designer later defended his t-shirts as "ironic," informing a reporter from the Jewish Weekly that the shirts parody actual racism and would only offend someone who "doesn't have a sense of humor."

Yet whereas The New Yorker honestly did not mean to offend, this designer acknowledged-and thereby affirmed-the notion that his t-shirt was offensive by feeding Metro the fake news that it had provoked an assault.

Perhaps this is what prejudice-for-profit looks like in a post-racial society. Having sold racism and parodies of racism for the last two centuries, merchants now advertise their products with deliberately racist parodies of racism.

Whether insinuating that Obama is a terrorist, hinting that black people should not occupy the Oval Office, or just trying to sell a t-shirt, these and countless other agents of prejudice show how volatile the racial faultlines of our country still are.

Jon Kole, rising College senior and co-founder of Penn Students for Barack Obama, would like to see the media treat popular reactions to Obama's race with more nuance.

Kole thinks the media "either don't publish anything at all, or flare up at the slightest infraction." He believes Obama's race excites his supporters more than it impassions his detractors, but notes that unconscious prejudices may also be at play.

"I would appreciate it if they would talk about the biased decisions people might be making without even knowing it," Kole said.

Certainly, real discord seethes beneath the public national banter about race. Nearly two-thirds of black respondents to a recent New York Times/CBS poll said "race relations were generally bad," compared to one-third of white respondents.

This uniquely integrated election is an ideal opportunity for our media to stop concealing raw racism with wit, or excusing bigotry - however unintentional - as a bad joke.

Let's have an open and honest discussion about why Americans from different racial or ethnic backgrounds have such different perceptions of each other and of this society.

All we have to fear is craven prejudice itself.

Julia Harte is a rising College senior from Berkeley, C.A. Her e-mail is jharte@dailypennsylvanian.com.