Truthful examination of cultural and social dynamics is bound to be met with a wall of obstruction. One is liable to be portrayed as a bigot by people on the Left, and one is liable to be portrayed as a collectivist by people on the Right. In both cases what we see is a promotion of artificial blindness.
Everything that can be said about an individual can also be said about a group of individuals. It is foolishness to disregard such things. Yes, there is such a thing as an individual will and an individual choice; there is also such a thing as a society and a culture. Recognizing one does not mean failing to recognize the other. To truly understand people in any given place and time it is necessary to understand both.
With political correctness, any sincere discussion of things such as this is shamed and attacked. What this means in reality is that political correctness drives a wedge between intelligence and sincerity. Sincerity is not allowed to be found in intelligence, so it gets found outside of the realm of intelligence: In fundamentalist religion, in right-wing talk shows, in things that are far inferior to intelligence in their understanding of what exists and in their vision for what should be.
"Stereotypical thinking" gets attacked the most; but anyone with any understanding of statistics knows that, when something exists at a rate greater than chance, there is going to be a reason for it. It may not be the reason that you expect it to be, but it doesn't just happen for no reason. If there were no true differences between cultures, life in all of the cultures would be approximately the same. Life in San Francisco would be similar to life in Kandahar; life in Harvard would be similar to life in Cabrini Green; life in Shanghai would be similar to life in Mogadishu; life in Paris would be similar to life in rural India. That not being the case, we see reasons for all sorts of social situations, good, bad or indifferent; and it is a matter of finding the actual reasons instead of denying the existence of the differences between the cultures.
No, it is not bigotry to say that Muslim men tend to be brutal to their wives, any more than it is bigotry to say that Chinese people tend to be hard-working. What are the reasons for both phenomena? There can be any number of reasons for these things; but what one absolutely cannot say is that such phenomena do not exist or that it is bigotry and stereotyped thinking to say that they do. Muslim men tend to be brutal to their wives. Chinese people tend to be hard-working. It is not bigotry to notice such things; it is artificial blindness to overlook them.
How did intelligence find itself in a place where it is used to impose artificial blindness? I would say that the roots of this lie in relativism; and relativism is the ideology of the conman. The result of political correctness has been to make the intelligent people insincere; meanwhile the less intelligent find their sincerity in ignorance and, claiming their ignorance to be integrity, barbarically impose it upon everyone else. The disconnect between intelligence and sincerity has been one of the worst things to have happened to American character. One group sophisticizes itself into irrelevance; the other group imposes aggressive ignorance on the country.
The greatest thing about Barack Obama is that he possesses both intelligence and sincerity. He has seen life on all sides. He has had to struggle a lot, and he has understanding that many political people lack. And he also is a brilliant and highly educated man who has put himself in a position to do something intelligent and worthwhile about such problems.
It is time to do away with political correctness entirely and replace it with sincere intelligence that notices all the component factors and quantifies them all. Only then can real, informed, solutions be achieved. And only then can the disconnect between intelligence and sincerity in America be overcome. And that will result in intelligent people becoming sincere and empowered, and in integrity being found in things that are true and intelligent rather than in fraud.
Doing this is one of the best things that one can conceivably do for America.