On New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina

--A story on Anderson Cooper 360 on vigilante justice during the 2005 hurricane.

--Melissa Harris Lacewell & James Perry's "Obama's Debt to New Orleans."

--Jason Shelton on Houston, Katrina evacuees, and the limits of hosptality.

--Teresa Wiltz's "Take Me Back to New Orleans."

--Michael Chertoff: "How Katrina Saved Lives."

Microsoft Pastes A White Man's Head On A Black Man's Body

A photograph on Microsoft's United States site showed three businesspersons attending a meeting. One was white, one was black, and one was Asian.

The version of that photo displayed on the company's Polish site replaced the face of the black man with the face of a white man--but did not change the hand of the black man from the original photo.

Microsoft has apologized and is "looking into the details of this situation."

Is The Medical System Racist?

Darshak Sanghavi considers the question.

Patricia Williams: Obama And The Black Elite

Williams writes: "The phenomenon of a black upper class has always been complicated, ambivalent. Often the descendants of 'house slaves,' some significant percentage grew up imitating the manners, mores, and various condescensions of white plantation society--including setting up private clubs and exclusionary networks. More recently, the ranks of the black upper middle class have been increased with beneficiaries of the civil rights movement-with people such as Barack and Michelle Obama, who represent a generation able to take advantage of increased access to jobs and schools once off limits. This new mobility has not altogether erased some of the clubbishness and snob appeal of older black organizations, however. There are still fault lines and hidden hierarchies within black social life."

"Teachable Moments Lost"

This is the title of Richard Cohen's August 25 column in the Washington Post. From the piece: "For this teachable moment, Obama might have recalled an incident out of his own past when, perchance, he was racially profiled--stopped, frisked or something for being a black man, particularly a young black man. He might have recounted an anecdote that could have offered us all a glimmer of what it is like to wear your skin color--but not your two Ivy League degrees, book contract, etc.--on your face so that you feel the opprobrium and suspicion of police officers and the averted glance of trembling white ladies. No. He did nothing of the sort."

Mother-in-Law Sues Comic For Defamation And "Racist Lies"

Comedian Sunda Croonquist is being sued by her mother-in-law for making certain jokes and telling "racist lies" during the comic's stand-up routine. Like the following riff by Croonquist as reported by the Huffington Post:

"I'm a black woman with a Jewish mother-in-law, you know the only thing we have in common is that we don't want to get our hair wet. So you know there was drama when we got the sonogram results cause she was real excited. 'OK, now that we know you're having a little girl I want to know what you're naming that little tchotchke. Now I realize there's a difference in the background with the African-American, colored, black, whatever you people call yourselves these days. Seriously, I just don't want a name that's difficult to pronounce like Shaniqua. Because in my mind I'm thinking of a name short but delicious. Like Hadassah or Goldie."

The linked story contains video of Croonquist's recent interview on the Today Show.

Looking For The "Great White Hope"

That's what Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R.-Kansas) told a crowd at a town hall meeting the Republicans are seeking. Her words: "Republicans are struggling to find the great white hope." Of course, the "sort of apology" apology followed: "I apologize if anyone misunderstood my intent." In the early 20th century the phrase "great white hope" was used by those hoping and searching for someone to defeat and take the heavyweight title from the boxer Jack Johnson, who happened to be black.

On Black Hair And Politics

Catherine Saint Louis' New York Times article discusses straightened and "good hair" and natural hair styles, and notes that "[c]ommenters on the conservative blog Free Republic attacked [Malia Obama] as unfit to represent America for stepping out unstraightened."

The Martha's Vineyard Panel On Race

A report is available here.

Just Asking

Why do major league baseball players spit so much?

Orlando Patterson On Racial Diveristy And Social Incorporation

Patterson's recent New York Times op-ed argues, among other things, that "for nonblacks, assimilation is alive and well in America. It is not passive integration into a static, Anglo-Protestant mainstream (which was always a sociological fiction anayway), but an endlessly dynamic two-way cultural process." But black Americans as the "great excpetion to this process of social incorporation" as the result of poverty (black poverty "stands at three times the white rate, just as it did in 1970)" and "chronic hypersegregation, true not only of the great majority of poor blacks but of working-class and middle-class blacks as well."

Barack Obama Is The Nation's First Black President

Or is he?

What?

Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, on last night's The Colbert Report: the Kennedys "created the civil rights movement."

A Judge's Bulletin Board Posting

From Lubbock, Texas: "County Judge Tom Head defended on Friday potentially offensive posters that commissioners removed from a public bulletin board he mantained in the courthouse." Commissioner Bill McCay "removed a series of printouts that began with a short narration of a person contemplatng waking up, putting on an Obama T-shirt and then abusing drugs, robbing a store and hitting his wife. A sheet of mug shots of mostly black men wearing Obama shirts had been tacked beneath the narration."

From The Root

"Obama Is A Racist?" and "But My Best Friend Is Black!"

Glenn Beck: Health Care Reform Is Really Reparations

Enjoy.

When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong

Discussions about and debates over Henry Louis Gates' alleged behavior and actual arrest reminded me of this Dave Chappelle take on when keeping it real can go wrong.

Malcolm Gladwell On Atticus Finch

Writing in the New Yorker, Gladwell argues that Atticus Finch, the fictional lawyer in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, was "a good Jim Crow liberal" who "dare[d] not challenge the foundations" of the white male jurors sitting in jugdment of his client, Tom Robinson. An interesting passage in Gladwell's piece: "But in cases where the status quo involves systemc injustice this [efforts at changing hearts] is no more than a temporary strategy. Eventually, such injustice requires more than a change of heart."

The Census And Counting Prisoners

A recent op-ed by Anthony Thompson, a law professor at NYU, notes that state prison inmates, who are disproportionately from urban areas, are counted as "residents" in the rural area state prisons in which they are incarcerated. "As a result, resources and electoral authority are transferred from inner cities to rural jurisdictions."

Dear Birthers

OK, let's try this again. Here is an actual picture of PRESIDENT OBAMA'S birth certificate. And here is a picture of the stamp and seal on PRESIDENT OBAMA'S birth certificate.

"Kill Me A Cop"

Twenty year old Antavio Johnson wrote a rap song entitled "Kill Me A Cop." He has been convicted under Florida law of the crime of "corruption by threat of public servant." Anita Allen comments on the "outrageous" conviction and sentence.

The 1999 Jewish Community Center Shootings

A short note on white supremacists' attack on the Jewish Center in Los Angeles as well as photos can be found here.

"A Summer of Race Talk Gone Bad"

Sherrilyn Ifill's The Root column argues, among other things, that structural racism "should be the focus of our 21-st century race talk," and that a "conversation about structural racism would invite us to examine how notions about race are deeply embedded in our legislative policies, our policing practices and our legal decison making. Yet we never got to this."

Huh?

Russell, on tonight's Big Brother After Dark, referred to Jeff's "self-defecating humor."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

A historic moment today as the Senate confirmed her nomination.

Crack News

Splitsville: Reggie Bush and Kim Kardashian.

"Presumed Guilty"

While reading Bob Herbert's op-ed on the arrest of Prof. Gates (see the preceding post) I remembered his December 2006 piece entitled "Presumed Guilty." There Herbert wrote that the "death of Sean Bell at the hands of undercover police officers, who also wounded his two companions in their 50-shot barrage in Queens nine days ago, brought to mind a case from a few years back in which undercover cops, acting on bogus information, attacked an innocent group of young people in a car in Manhattan. . . . The cops . . . assumed that the people in the car were lowlifes. They were all Ivy League graduates, and one is currently clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens." Read Herbert's account of how the occupants of the car (two who happened to be black, one of "mixed parentage," and one from the Philippines) were treated and arrested after the police acted on a mistaken computer report that the car was stolen. The driver of the car, then-25 year old Jason Rowley (who happens to be black), stated that "a lot of the officers told me that if this had been elsewhere--for example, if this had been in the Bronx or Harlem--I'd have been dead."

"Anger Has Its Place"

This is the title of Bob Herbert's op-ed on the Gates arrest and President Obama's suggestion that the incident be viewed as presenting a "teachable moment." Herbert: "[S]o far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it--especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill. . . . I have nothing but contempt for that message."

And: "Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We're never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage."

Boston Cop Likens Prof. Gates To A "Banana-Eating Jungle Monkey"

Boston police officer Justin Barrett was suspended after he sent out a mass e-mail stating that Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was a "banana-eating jungle monkey." Barrett's attorney "explained" to CNN that his client "did not call professor Gates a jungle monkey or malign him racially. He said his behavior was like that of one. It was a characterization of the actions of that man."

Can't make this stuff up.

Stanley Crouch On The Obama-Gates-Crowley Beer Summit

Check out Crouch's Daily Beast entry.

Shem Walker

From The Root, a story entitled "What About Shem?" According to the story, Shem Walker was recently killed by an undercover police officer. Please read this.

The 911 Call And The Gates Arrest

To hear the call, click here.

From the Associated Press: "The 911 caller who reported two men possibly breaking into the home of black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. did not describe their race, acknowledged they might just be having a hard time with the door and said she saw two suitcases on the porch." Sgt. James Crowley, who arrested Gates on a later dismissed charge of disorderly conduct, spoke with the caller, Lucia Whalen, after he arrived at Gates' home and wrote in his report that Whalen told him "that she observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch." Whalen's attorney says that Whalen never mentioned the mens' race to Crowley. The New York Times reports that Crowley's attorney, Wendy Murphy, said that Whalen "never used the word black and never said the word backpacks to anyone."

Recommended

"Prom Night in Mississippi," a documentary airing on HBO about the first ever racially integrated prom ever held at Charleston High School.

Leonard Pitts On The Gates Arrest

The columnist writes that Professor Henry Louis Gates "is a man who did the things African Americans are always advised to do--work hard, get a good education, better yourself, only to discover that in the end, none of it saved him. In the end, he still winds up standing on his front porch with his wrists shackled, just like any drug dealer or carjacker anywhere."

"Because sometimes, they just don't see you. It's one of the most frustrating verities of African-American life. Sometimes you simply know: they are looking your way but seeing their fears, their preconceptions, their stereotypes, that other black guy who did them wrong--everything except the one and only you."

Harold Hill (Glenn Beck): President Obama Is A Racist

According to Hill . . . uh, Beck, President Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." And, "I'm not saying he doesn't like white people. I'm saying he has a problem. . . . This guy is, I believe, a racist."