Malia Obama On Her Daddy

Malia said: "First African-American president. Better be good." Priceless.

From Slavery To The Inauguration

Consider this: "The inaugural itself will be at the Capitol, which was built by slaves who baked the bricks, sawed the timber and laid the stone for its foundation. When Mr. Obama delivers his Inaugural Address, he will be looking out across the National Mall, which was once a slave market, beyond the White House, also built by slaves, to the Lincoln Memorial, honoring the president who freed the slaves."

Frank Rich's "White Like Me"

Recommended: Frank Rich's "White Like Me" piece in the January 18 New York Times. A snippet: "Last week I joined a group of journalists at an off-the-record conversation with the president-elect, a sort of preview of the administration's coming attractions. But as I walked some desolate downtown blocks to the standard-issue federal office building serving as transition headquarters, ghosts of the past mingled with hopes for the future. The contrast between the unemployed men on Washington's frigid streets and the buzzing executive-branch bees inside was, for me, as old as time."

And: "Today the nation's capital still has no voting representation in Congress and is still a ward of the federal government, reduced to begging, pleading and cajoling for basic needs. Some 19 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and that 19 percent remains a secret to many who work within the Beltway."

Michael Eric Dyson On Obama's Use Of Language

Michael Eric Dyson, writing in the Washington Post on President-elect Obama's use of language, opines that "as much praise as [Obama] has justly received for speaking in a way that doesn't assault the white eardrum or worldview, his rhetoric is firmly rooted in black soil." Dyson recounts a January 2008 Obama speech in Sumter, South Carolina in which the then-candidate, speaking to a largely black audience about efforts to misrepresent his ideas, said "They're trying to bamboozle you" and "It's the same old okie-doke." In Dyson's view, "if you weren't familar with black culture, most of what he said and how he said it went right over your head--and beyond your ears."

A Mississippi High School's First Racially Integrated Prom

Charleston High School, located in the Mississippi delta, had its first racially integrated prom in 2008, ending a tradition of separate and privately organized proms for black and white students. In 1997 actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for an integrated prom; that offer was finally accepted last year and the event was captured on film for a documentary entitled "Prom Night in Mississippi."

School Resegregation

UCLA's Civil Rights Project recently released a report on the increasing segregation of minorities in highly unequal schools.

Prince A Plagiarist?

From Billboard: "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," Prince's 1994 hit, was plagiarized from a song written by two Italian composers, according to an Italian appeals court.

America's New Face(?)

From Politico: "Like the entertainers and athletes who preceded them as crossover pioneers, Obama and a new generation of smart, well-educated black professionals have unlocked the secret to political success by offering a broad-based, non-threatening agenda to whites while retaining their racial integrity with black voters." According to Sam Fulwood, "a new generation of black politicians--including Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.)--is challenging the Bible-toting civil rights leaders rather than joining them in reflexive protest marches. Obama is an exemplar of this group."

Tuskegee Airmen To Attend Obama Inauguration

At Tuesday's inauguration the living members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the nation's first black pilot squadron, will attend. The Airmen were invited by President-elect Barack Obama.

Recommended

KROI, Praise 92.1 FM, Houston.

Kansas Senate's First Black Female Senator

Congratulations to Senator Oletha Faust-Goudeau, sworn into office on January 12, 2009.

Prince Harry's Video

Click here to view it. As the News of the World story begins, "The soldier prince pours shame on the Royal Family as he calls an Asian squaddie 'our little Paki friend' and tells another officer cadet jokingly wearing a camouflage veil off duty: 'F*** me, you look like a raghead'--an offensive term for an Arab."

Politicized Hiring And Improper Personnel Actions In The Civil Rights Division

A July 2, 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Justice's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility was released publicly today. The report concluded that throughout his tenure in the Department's Civil Rights Division Brad Schlozman improperly considered political and ideological affiliations in selecting attorneys for the Department's Honors Program and summer law intern program.

Of particular interest is the report's finding that Schlozman transferred a lawyer identified as "Attorney A" out of the division's appellate section. As set out in the report (page 37, note 30), Attorney A (apparently an African American) graduated magna cum laude from a top law school, worked as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel, clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and assumed a career position in the Civil Rights Division. Her work in the appellate section received positive performance evaluations, including the observation that she had "strong analytical and writing skills," and she was commended for "an excellent job . . . in one of the most important Establishment Clause cases decided by the Supreme Court in recent years . . ." According to the report, Schlozman stated that Attorney A was "a Democrat in hiding and is not going to hide in my Appellate Division" and told a colleague that Attorney A "wrote in Ebonics," "was an idiot," and "was an affirmative action thing."

The report also refers to an August 2004 incident in which an e-mail to Schlozman from Voting Section Chief John Tanner asked Schlozman to bring coffee to a meeting. When Schlozman's reply asked how Tanner liked his coffee, Tanner responded," Mary Frances Berry style--black and bitter." (At that time Berry, an African American, was the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.) Schlozman forwarded the e-mail to several DOJ officials with the message "Y'all will appreciate Tanner's response."

These people worked in the Civil Rights Division. The Civil Rights Division!!

Affective And Behavioral Responses To Racism

The current edition of Science magazine contains an interesting discussion of the paradox of the condemnation of overt racial prejudice and the frequent occurrence of blatantly racist acts. From the report's abstract: "The present research demonstates that although people predicted that they would be very upset by a racist act, when people actually experienced this event they showed relatively little emotional distress. Furthermore, people overestimated the degreee to which a racist comment would provoke social rejection of the racist. These findings suggest that racism may persevere in part because people who anticipate feeling upset and believe that they will take action may actually respond with indifference when faced with an act of racism."

Oscar Grant, Dead At 22

On New Year's Day Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African American, was shot to death by Bay Area Transit Authority police officer Johannes Mehserle. Grant was unarmed. A video of the shooting can be viewed here.

UPDATE: The officer who shot and killed Mr. Grant has been arrested.

Racial Discrimination In The Advertising Industry

The NAACP has issued a press release announcing a new study of racial discrimination in the advertising industry. The Madison Avenue Project found, among other things, that racial discrimination in the industry is 38% worse than in the overall labor market of the United States and is twice as bad today as it was 30 years ago.

Adolph Grimes III, Dead At 22

Tragedy in New Orleans: Adolph Grimes, a 22-year-old African-American man, worked in Houston and was in New Orleans visiting his family for the New Year's holiday. In the early morning hours of January 1 he became the first New Orleans homicide of 2009 as he was shot 14 times, including 12 times in the back, by New Orleans police officers. Seven officers who fired their guns at Mr. Grimes and two additional officers at the scene of the shooting have been reassigned pending an internal police department review of the incident. According to the police department, Mr. Grimes started a "gun battle" by firing at an unmarked police vehicle.

Racial Diversity In The GOP?

"As the nation is on the verge of inaugurating its first black president, the Republican Party is facing a telling choice: whether to elect its first black chairman." As noted in this account, of the six candidates for Republican Party chair four are white and two (Michael Steele and Ken Blackwell) are black. The white candidates include Katon Dawson of South Carolina, who resigned from membership in an all-white country club just before becoming a candidate, and Chip Saltsman of Tennessee, who sent to party members a holiday CD containing the song "Barack the Magic Negro."

More On Black In Bellaire

For discussion of black residents' interactions and experiences with police officers in Bellaire, "a comfortable, mostly affluent enclave in the middle of Houston," see this story.

Recommended

Glenn Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (2008). The principal thesis of Loury's argument: "[W]e law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society--the society we have made--creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice."