The latest denial is from golfer Sergio Garcia. Asked a joking question about having dinner with his adversary Tiger Woods, Garcia said: “We will serve fried chicken.” He later apologized for what he called a “silly remark,” then added, “but in no way was the comment meant in a racist manner.”

Perhaps the Spanish-born Garcia was unaware that chicken stereotypes have been used for at least a century to denigrate African-Americans. Maybe he was unaware of attitudes buried in his subconscious mind. As the backlash increased, Garcia did apologize further, calling his remark “totally stupid and out of place.”

But by then, he had secured a place on the lengthy roll of people who have offered justifications for statements widely considered offensive.

How can words so hurtful be so easily brushed off? And what does the word “racist” even mean if it doesn’t encompass people who use racial slurs?

“I think it’s human nature that if you’re a racist, you don’t want to admit it,” says conservative radio host Mike Gallagher.

“If Tiger said, ‘Let’s serve tacos at dinner with Garcia,’ the world would go crazy,” Gallagher said. “When a bigot tells a bigoted joke and they get called out on it, the pattern is, I’ll say I’m sorry and maybe it will blow over.”

The pattern is unmistakable. Said golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, after joking that Woods shouldn’t order fried chicken for the Masters champions’ dinner: The comments were “misconstrued.” Said comedian Michael Richards, after responding to a black heckler with a lynching reference and the N-word: “I’m not a racist.” Said actor Mel Gibson, after claiming that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world: “I’m not a bigot.”

The phenomenon has been even more pronounced since Barack Obama became America’s first black president:

—Montana’s chief federal judge resigned after emailing a joke in which a young Obama asks why he is black and his mother is white. The punch line involved a dog. “Although (the joke) is racist, I’m not that way, never have been,” Judge Richard Cebull said.

— After drawing national attention for selling an anti-Obama bumper sticker that said “Don’t Re-Nig in 2012,” creator Paula Smith of Hinesville, Georgia insisted that neither she nor the sticker were racist. She called the uproar “amazing and entertaining.”

— New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino was pilloried for sending an email labeled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal” that showed an African tribesman dancing. His response: “I’m not a racist. I’m proud to have created jobs for hundreds of people of every colour and ethnicity.”

— Arizona radio host Barbara Espinosa said she “voted for the white guy” and called Obama a monkey. Asked if that was offensive, she replied, “I’m anything but racist.”

Clay Routledge, a social psychology professor at North Dakota State University who studies the ways people defend themselves against psychological threats, said they often engage in “self-deception”: They may think they’re a good athlete, for example, or have an outgoing personality — or do not have racial biases.

“People have narratives about themselves, self concepts, a whole host of attitudes that they want to think about themselves,” said Routledge. “A lot of times they match well, but sometimes they don’t.”

Other psychologists go further. They blame “implicit bias” — unconscious attitudes based on the way racial groups are commonly portrayed in the public space.

Using scientific studies that measure how quickly people associate words like “black” with “criminal” or “Asian-American” with “foreign,” these researchers conclude that many people — of all backgrounds, not just white people — are unaware of their own racial biases.

Phillip Atiba Goff, a UCLA social psychology professor, says this may be what happened with Garcia: “He was trying to be funny. In the moment, especially if you’re nervous and not thinking, stereotypes come to mind very quickly.”

Goff emphasizes that having an unconscious bias does not mean someone is a racist — it means he or she is a human being who has absorbed ubiquitous information.

So, can a person say something racist but not BE a racist? Might people who make racist statements be telling the truth when they say they are not racist?

Goff says it depends on the individual — but that the rush to brand people as racist obscures the bigger issue of the harm caused by their statements.

“Let’s have a conversation about why (Garcia) said it in the first place, and why these moments seem to come up so much,” Goff said. “We should be able to say, ‘You know what, that was one of those implicit bias moments.’”

Whatever they are called, such moments come up every day for Logan Smith, a journalist who runs the Twitter feed YesYoureRacist. He started about eight months ago, after noticing a plethora of tweets starting with “I’m not racist, but.”

Some of his favourite examples: “I’m not racist but having a black president is just not smart,” ”I’m not racist but black people scare me,” and “I’m not racist but I can see where Hitler was coming from.”

He said most of the tweets seem to come from teenagers: “They didn’t grow up seeing ‘coloreds only’ water fountains, or civil rights marches in the papers, or apartheid on TV, and as a result, many of them simply don’t understand what racism means,” Smith said via email.

“They think that unless they’re actually lynching a black person or something, they’re not racist,” Smith said, “because they don’t understand things like institutionalized racism or inferiorization, and the historical context of their statement.”

Many might not know the ugly history of chicken and black stereotypes.

In the early 1900s, periodicals and postcards commonly displayed images of black people as grotesque, simple-minded “coons” obsessed with chicken and watermelon. From the 1920s to the 1950s, a three-restaurant chain of Coon Chicken Inns was popular around Salt Lake City, Seattle and Portland.

So when people associate black folks with chicken, the past often rushes into the present — as in a famous routine by the black comedian Dave Chappelle.

“A lot of black people can relate to this. Have you ever had something happen that was so racist, that you didn’t even get mad?” Chappelle said.

He then tells a story about walking into a restaurant, contemplating his order with the counterman, and “before I even finish my sentence he says, ‘The chicken!’”

“All these years I thought I liked chicken ’cause it was delicious,” Chappelle said. “Turns out I’m genetically predisposed to liking chicken!”

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Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. He can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/jessewashington or jwashington(at)ap.org.

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Online:

Mike Gallagher: http://mikeonline.com

Logan Smith: http://twitter.com/YesYoureRacist

Implicit Association Test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html

Dave Chappelle: http://youtu.be/wJ4B7G8Rw3Q

U.S. markets fell immediately after the opening bell following a global slump prompted in part by an unexpectedly weak report on manufacturing in China.

Concern that the Federal Reserve might ease back on its economic stimulus program sooner than expected had also riled investors.

The market recovered much of the losses as investors considered those fears overdone.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell a fraction or 13 points to 15,295 Thursday. The Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 5 points to 1,651, or 0.3 per cent. The Nasdaq composite fell 4 points to 3,459, or 0.1 per cent.

Declining stocks outnumbered advancers on the New York Stock Exchange.

Volume was above average at 3.83 billion shares.

Their prediction Thursday calls for 13 to 20 named Atlantic storms, 7 to 11 that strengthen into hurricanes and 3 to 6 that become major hurricanes.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there is a 70 per cent chance that this year will be more active than an average hurricane season.

If you live in hurricane prone areas along the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico coasts, “This is your warning,” acting NOAA administrator Kathryn Sullivan said.

A normal year has 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 3 major storms with winds over 110 mph.

Last year was the third-busiest on record with 19 named storms. Ten became hurricanes and were two major storms. That included Sandy, which caused $50 billion in damage even though it lost hurricane status when it made landfall in New Jersey.

All the factors that go into hurricane forecasts are pointing to an active season, or extremely active one, said lead forecaster Gerry Bell of the Climate Prediction Center.

Those factors include: warmer than average ocean waters that provide fuel for storms, a multi-decade pattern of increased hurricane activity, the lack of an El Nino warming of the central Pacific Ocean, and an active pattern of storm systems coming off west Africa.

The Atlantic hurricane season goes through about 25 to 40 year cycles of high activity and low activity. The high activity period started around 1995, Sullivan said.

The forecasts don’t include where storms might land, if any place. Despite the formation of more hurricanes recently, the last time a major hurricane made landfall in the United States was Wilma in 2005. That seven-year stretch is the longest on record.

In Halifax on Friday, The Canadian Hurricane Centre plans to hold a media briefing on the upcoming 2013 hurricane season and the steps Canadians can take to be prepared.

The six-month season starts June 1. Forecasters name tropical storms when their top winds reach 39 mph; hurricanes have maximum winds of at least 74 mph.

This year’s names: Andrea, Barry, Chantal, Dorian, Erin, Fernand, Gabrielle, Humberto, Ingrid, Jerry, Karen, Lorenzo, Melissa, Nestor, Olga, Pablo, Rebekah, Sebastien, Tanya, Van and Wendy.

–With files from The Canadian Press

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Online:

NOAA: www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outlooks/hurricanes.shtml

FEMA preparedness; www.ready.gov

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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

And so she raced against the storm. She had 30 miles to cover from her job in Edmond to Plaza Towers Elementary School, where her 8-year-old daughter Jazmin Rodriguez is a third grader.

She lost.

The tornado got there first, and the destruction kept her from driving the final few hundred yards. And so she got out of her car and ran, arriving to find little left of the school and almost nothing of the neighbourhood.

Panic set in.

Survivors of the storm were frantic, pulling children from the twisted metal and piles of concrete rubble that remained of what was once a school. She knew her three youngest children were safe at their daycare, but Jazmin was somewhere inside the rubble.

Terror came next.

“Right when I ran up to ask if I could start pulling people out or try to help, some guy just handed her to me,” Garcia said. “I only recognized her from her clothes. My mind was in so many different places, I couldn’t even remember what she wore that day.”

Finally, relief.

The emotion seared on her face, she scooped her daughter into her arms and set off across the now barren landscape away from the place where seven of Jazmin’s schoolmates had died.

An Associated Press photographer, Sue Ogrocki, captured the moment: Mother and daughter, clutching each other, making their way to safety through a decimated neighbourhood. All that stood behind them was a tree stripped of its limbs and bark, brutally wrapped in sheet metal by the storm.

“It was a long way toward the end of the parking lot,” Garcia recalled. “And she’s a heavy girl. There were times I didn’t think I was going to make it. But I did.”

The picture was published on hundreds of front pages around the world, becoming one of the enduring images from the storm.

KRQE-TV reports (http://bit.ly/10pHzTh ) that Lillie Smith was recently indicted by a Bernalillo County grand jury for trafficking, conspiracy to commit trafficking, tampering with evidence and possession.

Court documents show the charges stem from a warrant served at her apartment in 2011.

Deputies suspected that the woman’s son, Nathan Jones, was running a small drug operation out of her home. But the sheriff’s office said deputies found cocaine and marijuana on Smith, and she tried to stash the drugs during the investigation.

“It’s definitely not something you see every day,” said Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Aaron Williamson. “When detectives were on scene she did try to take the narcotics that were on her person out and stash them.”

During the search, investigators found scales, money, narcotics and other items believed to be connected to trafficking, Williamson said.

Jones was arrested in 2011 but Smith was not because of a medical condition.

The district attorney’s office later filed charges and a grand jury returned the indictment earlier this year. She was arrested in April but bonded out of jail. It was not clear if Smith or Jones has a lawyer.

According to online court records, Smith pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in the 1990s. Her next court appearance is scheduled in July.

In a wide-ranging national security speech, Obama says the Yemen transfers will now be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. The U.S. does not transfer detainees to another country without receiving security assurances, including that those who remain a threat must not be released.

Obama halted all transfers to Yemen after the failed Dec. 25, 2009 bombing attempt of an airliner over Detroit. The convicted bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, trained in Yemen.

Of the 166 detainees currently at Guantanamo, about 90 are Yemeni.

Obama says in a speech on counterterrorism Thursday he is troubled by the idea that leaks investigations may chill the investigative journalism that he says holds government accountable.

In recent weeks, the administration has acknowledged secretly seizing portions of two months of phone records from The Associated Press and reading the emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen in separate investigations about the publication of government secrets.

The president says the government has to strike the right balance between security and an open society. He says Holder will meet with representatives of media organizations and report back to him by July 12.

In a speech on new contours of his counterterrorism strategy, Obama took note Thursday of a number of proposed ways of doing that —- including the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch of the government.

He did not endorse any particular proposal but said he will engage Congress in exploring a number of options for increased oversight. He cautioned that some proposals may introduce a layer of bureaucracy into national-security decision-making, without giving the public added confidence in the oversight process.

Obama also said that his administration already briefs Congress on all drone operations.

Payne premiered his black-and-white follow-up to “The Descendants” on Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival, where the gentle tale drew largely enthusiastic reviews for both its warmth and its colorless cinematography.

“It just seemed like the right thing to do for this film,” Payne told reporters Thursday at the French Riviera festival. “I always wanted to make a film in black and white. It’s such a beautiful form. It really left our cinema because of commercial, not artistic reasons.”

“This modest, austere story seemed to lend itself to being made in black and white,” he added.

“Nebraska” stars Bruce Dern as an aging father, whose son (Will Forte) drives him from Montana to Nebraska to placate his father’s delusional belief that he’s won $1 million from a mass mailing.

Particularly in black and white, it’s an unsentimental, melancholy portrait of a decaying American heartland — its drab bars, roadside motels and paint-chipped farm houses. In noting the appropriateness of black and white for such a landscape, Payne called the movie “a Depression-era film.”

The approach — never seen as exactly a box-office draw — took negotiating with Paramount, which will release “Nebraska” in November.

“It took some discussions with the studio, Paramount in this case, to get them to agree to let me make it in black and white,” Payne said. “We did settle on a budget less than it would have been had the film been in colour, but still at a rate I felt comfortable to make a decent film.”

The film marks a kind of homecoming for Payne, a Nebraska native, whose recent films have been set in Hawaii (the Oscar-winning “The Descendants”) and California (the Napa Valley road trip “Sideways”). Payne’s first three films (“Citizen Ruth,” ”Election” and “About Schmidt”) were all in his home state.

“If I weren’t from Nebraska, I wouldn’t have made this film at all, because I’m sure the script never would have come to me,” Payne said, referring to Bob Nelson’s screenplay. “If it were called ‘Iowa,’ maybe I would have gotten it.”

Payne first read the script nine years ago.

“I had the script for this while I was making ‘Sideways,’ but I was so sick and tired of shooting in cars by the time ‘Sideways’ was finished, I didn’t want to make this one right away,” he said. “That’s why it’s been 10 years.”

The last notable film in black and white to premiere at Cannes was the 2011 silent film ode and best-picture winning “The Artist.” Payne’s were from another movie era, though, taking inspiration from Peter Bogdanovich’s stark 1970s black-and-white “Paper Moon” and “The Last Picture Show.”

“One thing I like about this story is the son wishes to give the aging father some dignity,” Payne said. “My parents are in the home stretch and that was very personal to me.”

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

“Manuscripts Don’t Burn” tells the story of an Iranian author secretly writing his memoirs — and authorities’ attempts to destroy the manuscript.

Publicists for the movie said Rasoulof would attend Friday’s official screening. The film is competing in Cannes’ sidebar competition, Un Certain Regard.

In 2010, Rasoulof and fellow director Jafar Panahi were arrested in Iran for filming without a permit, sentenced to six years prison and banned from filmmaking for 20 years on charges that included “making propaganda” against the ruling system.

Rasoulof’s sentence was later reduced to a year on appeal, and he is currently on bail.

His film “Goodbye” won a prize at Cannes in 2011, but the director wasn’t allowed to travel to France to accept it.

“Manuscripts Don’t Burn” was made clandestinely in Iran, and the names of its cast and crew do not appear on the credits.

There was much speculation about the film in the run-up to the Cannes festival, which ends Sunday. When the Cannes lineup was announced last month, Rasoulof’s entry was listed simply as “Anonymous.”