Yea it's softening the language - averaging out to spread blame.
Just like when niggers take their niggery to Japan and get roundly beaten, mocked, and ostracized, somehow it's a problem of "American culture." The only problem with the American culture is that we haven't caged and/or deported all of them - nogging isn't acceptable behavior in proper American culture. But niggers are a protected species here, so our immune response that would be analogous to Japan's has been suppressed.
So maybe it is a bit of an American culture problem, just not in the way it's intended. But that would be akin to saying it's an "Asian" cultural problem that India hasn't been glassed by China et. al.