10889: Republican Rips Kwanzaa.

From The Chicago Tribune…

A quarrel with Kwanzaa

By Clarence Page

Reports of a so-called war against Christmas may be wildly exaggerated, but at least one Wisconsin lawmaker really is waging a war against Kwanzaa.

In a war by news release, Wisconsin Republican state Sen. Glenn Grothman of West Bend fired this recent blast: “Why are hard-core left wingers still trying to talk about Kwanzaa — the supposed African-American holiday celebration between Christmas and New Year’s?”

“Hard-core left wingers?” Surely he is not talking about greeting card companies, fast-food chains or the U.S. Postal Service, among others who have capitalized on Kwanzaa in recent years. Surely he doesn’t mean presidents like George W. Bush who, with first lady Laura Bush, annually praised Kwanzaa’s “focus on the importance of family, community and history, and to reflect on the Nguzo Saba or seven principles of African culture.”

Those seven principles, as President Bush noted, are “unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith.” If people hear something sinister in that list, I think they have the problem, not Kwanzaa.

Yet, Grothman assures us that he has only the best interests of African-Americans in mind. After all, he says, “almost no black people today care about Kwanzaa — just white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people’s throats in an effort to divide Americans.”

Unfortunately the only person I hear in those passages who is trying to divide America is Grothman. He’s not alone among conservatives who denounce Kwanzaa, he’s just one of the more prominent.

I could ignore his ravings more easily if they did not feed an unfortunate narrative of “blackophobia,” defined in the online Urban Dictionary as “an exaggerated fear of black people” and black culture. At a time when Republicans are struggling nationally to expand the party’s appeal beyond its mostly non-Hispanic white base, Grothman is not helpful.

He ended his Kwanzaa release, which he also emailed to his constituents, by cautioning parents to “be on the lookout if a K-12 or college teacher tries to tell your children or grandchildren it’s a real holiday.”

His remarks were predictably denounced, especially by Democrats. But I’m not mad at him. If Kwanzaa, a product of the 1960s black consciousness revolution, really is on the wane, nothing will help to re-energize it more than attacks from clueless culture warriors.

Let’s get a few things straight: Like it or not, Kwanzaa is all about inclusion, not division. “Kwanzaa is clearly an African holiday created for African peoples,” says the Official Kwanzaa Website. “But other people can and do celebrate it, just like other people participate in Cinco de Mayo celebrations besides Mexicans; Chinese New Year festivities besides Chinese; Native American powwows besides Native Americans.”

Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, born Ronald McKinley Everett, now an Africana Studies professor at California State University at Long Beach, to be the first pan-African holiday. His goal was to give black Americans, stripped by slavery of our ancestral traditions, an Africa-centered alternative to the existing mainstream holidays — without trying to replace them.

Unfortunately, Karenga had a hard time upholding his own lofty seven principles. He served prison time in the early 1970s for felonious assault and false imprisonment connected to his radical organization. U.S. congressional investigations later found that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had provoked violent conflicts between the U.S. and the Black Panthers. Yet, Kwanzaa’s good reputation has outlasted that of its founder.

As one who remembers those turbulent 1960s, I think Kwanzaa serves as an important spiritual and familial need for African-Americans as we re-examine ourselves through the lens that W.E.B. DuBois called the “double consciousness” of being African and American.

My family and I celebrated the lighting of a menorah-like Kwanzaa kinara annually with family, friends and neighbors of all races and creeds. The tradition has faded somewhat as our son has grown up. Kwanzaa, like Santa Claus, just isn’t the same without kids.

But I’m willing to bring back our family festival if Sen. Grothman is in town and would like to join us for a real Kwanzaa experience. He would be welcome. Kwanzaa’s first principle is “unity.” We don’t have to be uniform.

10570: The Truly Disadvantaged Today.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Revisiting the ‘truly disadvantaged’ 25 years later

By Clarence Page

Twenty-five years after sociologist William Julius Wilson’s important study on urban decline and vanishing marriageable men, poverty is still with us. And we’re finding lots of new ways to argue about it.

Back then, Ronald Reagan-era conservatives were blaming urban “areas of concentrated poverty,” single parenthood and welfare dependency. Many liberals mounted soapboxes to blame racism as their convenient one-size-fits-all explanation.

Wilson, then a University of Chicago sociologist who since has moved to Harvard, offered an alternative view in “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy,” a short book — 176 pages — that stirred hundreds of follow-up studies and changed the national conversation about poverty.

Wilson blamed the decline on post-World War II industrial America and the evaporation of good-paying jobs. Without the resources that enabled two-parent families to sustain themselves, inner cities were left with a new largely dependent “underclass.”

Memorably, the book introduced such new terms as “marriageable men” to describe the shortage of men who were capable economically and otherwise to make good husbands. Even if you agree with social conservatives, as I do, about the importance of two-parent families, efforts to improve the supply of marriageable men have fallen woefully short of demand.

That message echoed at a conference sponsored by the Century Foundation in Washington, D.C., to revisit Wilson’s book on its 25th anniversary. Wilson’s book offered a center-left counterweight to conservative Charles Murray’s provocative1984 book “Losing Ground,” which argued for ending welfare dependency by ending welfare. Murray didn’t get that wish, but his book stirred a national debate that led to the 1996 welfare reform law that President Bill Clinton signed, after vetoing two other harsher bills passed by a Republican Congress.

The good news: Children on welfare dropped to their lowest level in 30 years after welfare reform was passed, helped by the era’s economic boom. The bad news, Wilson said at the Century forum, is that the “underclass” is still with us, although the word has fallen out of political correctness in many circles.

“There is little wrong with our ‘underclass’ that a little time and a lot of jobs would not cure,” I wrote in a column about Wilson’s then-new book. I have since expanded that view. Culture matters, too, I have realized. It doesn’t do any good to offer some people a job if their values don’t lead them to take it. That concerns Wilson, too. At the conference, he and other policy experts explored the importance of “neighborhood effects” that can undermine values and incentives to, for example, pack up and move to where jobs might be more available.

Wilson credited welfare reform and the robust economy of the 1990s with reducing underclass poverty, but noted that poverty has rebounded since 2000. The dip in the 1990s might prove to be only a “blip” in the long-term decline of concentrated poverty communities, he said.

Black prison incarceration also has increased, putting even more of a chill on black incomes, family life and marriageable men.

“Quite frankly I think that (President Barack) Obama’s programs have prevented poverty, including concentrated poverty, from rapidly rising, considering the terrible economy,” Wilson said. He included Obama’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which earmarked $80 billion for low-income Americans. It included such emergency benefits as an extension of unemployment benefits, a temporary increase in the earned income tax credit and additional funds for food stamps. It also offered $4 billion in job-training and workforce enhancement programs and $2 billion for neighborhood stabilization efforts, Wilson noted.

Taken together, Wilson said, Obama’s programs exceed the spending on low-income Americans by any of the six previous presidents. “Now given all of this action during Obama’s first term,” in terms of addressing problems of concentrated poverty, Wilson concluded in his prepared remarks, “which presidential candidate would you take your chances on …?” Which one, indeed.

Neither side has all the answers in our national poverty debate. But we need to at least talk about it, before we make the matter worse.

10167: Criticizing Diddy Warbucks.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Diddy’s son isn’t the problem, inequality is

By Clarence Page

Seldom has anybody’s scholarship kicked up so much controversy.

Critics are outraged that UCLA, strapped for cash in California’s budget crisis, awarded a $54,000 merit-based athletic scholarship to Justin Combs, son of hip-hop impresario Sean “Diddy” Combs, who hardly needs the cash.

You don’t have to live in the Golden State to understand the outrage. Soaring college costs, battered state budgets and shrinking opportunities for rising income are a national crisis.

But, as they say in hip-hop culture, let’s be real.

Justin’s scholarship money doesn’t come from taxpayer funds, UCLA says, and wouldn’t even tickle the state’s projected $16 billion deficit if it did.

And picking on Diddy’s fortune or his son’s hard-earned achievements distracts us from the issue burning at the core of the discontent: How do we make higher education more affordable for young strivers who don’t have wealthy parents?

No question that Diddy is rich. In April he topped Forbes’ latest of the wealthiest moguls in hip-hop with an estimated net worth of $550 million, which makes Justin’s scholarship sound like pocket change. On the youngster’s 16th birthday in 2010, daddy gave him a $360,000 Maybach, which is to cars what Beverly Hills is to neighborhoods.

Yet Justin, to his credit, defies the slacker-rich-kid stereotype. He finished his senior year at Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle, N.Y., with a reported 3.75 GPA and football scholarship offers from at least four colleges.

That’s why he tweeted last week to all the haters out there: “Regardless what the circumstances are, I put that work in!!!! PERIOD.”

Indeed, it appears that he did. While a good ethical argument can be made for directing scholarship money to students based on their economic need, another also can be made for motivating students toward excellence with rewards that are based on their own achievement, regardless of their family’s wealth or lack of it.

In the best of times, colleges have enough money to offer both. These are not the best of times. With that in mind, we can only hope Diddy will become a generous football dad, creating new scholarships in his son’s honor to show his appreciation. Just a suggestion.

After all, I suspect the rage over Diddy and Son largely has been inflamed by the way daddy Diddy symbolizes our society’s unresolved issues of income inequality, class divisions and culture wars. The rap music mogul embodies the “1 percent” that Occupy Wall Street protests and the hip-hop industry that outrages cultural conservatives.

Yet, the real source of our national frustration is less glamorous and more widespread. Upward mobility in America is not what it used to be. It’s easier to climb the socioeconomic ladder in many parts of Europe than it is in the U.S., according to recent reports from Brookings Institution, Pew Research Center and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In other words, today’s aspiring youths on average have an easier time moving up the socioeconomic ladder in many parts of traditionally class-conscious Europe than here in the home of the American dream.

Without some schooling beyond high school, it is becoming increasingly difficult to enter the middle class or stay in it. Yet Washington has been gridlocked in budget fights or simply brain-dead about new ideas that can lead to comprehensive remedies.

The partisan fight over student loan interest rates, for example, is expected to lead to short-term solutions. Raising interest rates would be too unpopular for lawmakers to allow in an election year, even though student loan debt already is breaking records.

While lawmakers argue, hundreds of thousands of low-income students will lose their Pell Grants as of July 1. That’s because of a little-noticed congressional decision to save $11 billion over 10 years by reducing or eliminating aid to the most effective program for helping low-income students move up the educational ladder.

As we see doors closing on opportunities for advancement, Diddy and his kid’s scholarship are only visible symbols of our frustration. We can’t all be leaders of hip-hop or other industries, but we all deserve to have a chance to try. That used to be the American dream. We hate to see it go, but it’s slipping away.

10033: Black Bachelors Not Wanted…?

From The Chicago Tribune…

Call for black ‘Bachelors’

By Clarence Page

A class-action suit filed by two black men claims “The Bachelor” turned them away because they were not white. I think they should feel relieved. Having the right to embarrass yourself on national television doesn’t mean you actually should do it.

Nevertheless, there is no shortage of people seeking fame by way of the so-called “reality” TV shows such as this dating competition, which has been on ABC since 2002, and its sister show, “The Bachelorette.” Two of them are Nathaniel Claybrooks and Christopher Johnson of Nashville. They say in a suit filed in federal court there that they were not given the same consideration as white candidates when they tried out to be contestants during a regional casting call.

They’re not saying they definitely should have been selected, said their Washington-based lawyer, Cyrus Mehri, only that they be given “the same level of consideration as white applicants.”

The lawsuit, which names ABC and Mike Fleiss, executive producer of the two programs, claims the dating shows have never featured a person of color in the central role of deciding who, among the season’s lineup of dates, is the winning choice as a potential mate.

Does their suit have a chance? Civil rights lawyers say the plaintiffs could depose producers of both shows and probe everything from contestant applications to internal production memos during the discovery process. That could prove hazardous for any sort of show-business enterprise, since industry people can be brutally candid about the talent they seek. Think of “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell at his worst.

In one recent example, Acura apologized after a leaked casting-call sheet for its Super Bowl commercial asked for an African-American car dealer to be “nice looking, friendly, not too dark.” A spokesman explained that “the skin tone restriction was to avoid problems with lighting and special effects.” Yet, one wonders, would they turn down stars like, for example, Taye Diggs or Sidney Poitier or Lou Gossett Jr., without even giving them a try-out?

The dating shows bring up a deeper social question about our times: America is past being ready for a black president, but is it ready for a black “Bachelor”? The biggest challenge in the show’s casting process is to find bachelors who viewers in America’s vast mainstream national audience will care enough about to stay tuned-in for the duration of each season.

It is reasonable to assume that race, like any other visible characteristic, will figure into that decision even though it probably is not legal and certainly not politically correct in today’s racial etiquette to say so or mention it in writing.

Regardless of how the lawsuit turns out, I suspect the marketplace may well decide this issue. If the show’s ratings fall into a steep enough decline, for example, its producers may well want to cast a nonwhite bachelor to give the program an attractive burst of social tension. That’s show biz.

And, my snobbish tastes aside, numerous TV viewers await a nonwhite “Bachelor” or “Bachelorette” with the nervous anticipation that earlier generations felt about Jackie Robinson crossing baseball’s color line in the 1940s. Lamar Hurd, an African-American Portland, Ore.-based sportscaster, has reportedly been in talks with the show to be the first black “Bachelor” after he was the subject of a social media campaign. As the old TV saying goes, stay tuned.

Many of us had hoped that America had gotten past such hang-ups when Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, kissed Lt. Uhuru, played by Nichelle Nichols, on the original “Star Trek” series in 1968, which is often cited as the first interracial kiss on a scripted television series. Yet the people who create network television are still nervous about what the heartland of America will accept.

Meanwhile, in the real world interracial relations are rapidly becoming old news, even in the heartland. Paul Taylor, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, recently revealed a poll that found 15 percent of marriages in the United States are interracial, compared with only about 0.1 percent in 1961. “The human heart is the last frontier,” Taylor said.

Or maybe, as they used to say on “Star Trek,” it will be “the final frontier.”

9756: Debunking The Black Suicide Myth.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Time to shatter the black suicide myth

By Clarence Page

The death of Don Cornelius, creator and host of “Soul Train,” brought two conflicting memories to mind: the weekly joy of that iconic program as a defining feature of black American pop culture, and the terrible pain inflicted on the surviving family and friends of those who commit suicide.

Like countless other boomers, I grew up with “Soul Train.” Today, the old clips look like an amusing period piece, especially to our kids or grandkids who wonder how any of us could have thought those “Saturday Night Fever” fashions were cool.

But in the 1970s and beyond, “Soul Train” defined cutting-edge cool. It became the longest-running syndicated show of its type on TV and, as Cornelius said every week, “The hippest trip in the galaxy.”

But the hip trip finally came to an end a few years ago on TV and for Cornelius, amid reports of failing health. Police say he died in his Los Angeles home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

That tragedy has special meaning in the African-American community, which has long nourished a dangerous myth that black people don’t commit suicide.

It is a point of mythical ethnic pride that our ancestors found ways to persevere despite centuries of slavery, struggle and hardship. Black people created the blues, it is often said, because we didn’t have psychotherapists.

Besides, as an old joke goes, we black people don’t kill ourselves because you can’t kill yourself by jumping out of a basement window. We can only wish that were true. Although whites and Native Americans have the highest suicide rates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the black suicide rate has been high enough in recent years to claim one African-American every 4.5 hours.

No group is immune. By gender, non-Hispanic white and Native American men have the highest suicide rates, of about 25 lives per 100,000. That’s more than four times the rate of women in each racial group. It also is more than twice the rate of black and Hispanic men, whose suicide rate of about 11 per 100,000 is five times the rate of black and Hispanic women. Asian-American men have a rate of about 9 per 100,000, slightly more than twice the rate of Asian-American women.

Yet the black suicide myth persists. “As a mental-health advocate, over the years I’ve heard variations of the ‘black people don’t commit suicide’ meme,” wrote Bassey Ikpi on the black-oriented The Root website after Cornelius’ death. “Yesterday the chorus was deafening. People went so far as to create elaborate conspiracy theories rather than accept what could be a simple truth — that Cornelius had taken his own life.”

I share her sense of frustration. I suddenly became an expert because of a personal tragedy, as many Chicagoans know. Back in May 1984, suicide ended the life and career of Leanita McClain, an award-winning Chicago Tribune columnist and ghetto-to-Gold-Coast success story.

She was also my former wife. She killed herself with an overdose of prescribed pills two years after our divorce. Her upward career trajectory, like our marriage, was stopped only by the furies of her relentless depression.

“Happiness is a private club that will not let me enter,” she wrote in her “generic suicide note.”

It is not hard, although it is not pain-free either, for me to imagine that Don Cornelius could have written the same message. Suicides inflict a terrible cruelty on the survivors. Everyone asks “why” and there are no easy answers. I was surprised by how many of my friends came forth to share stories of their own loved ones who had ended their lives or come close to it in their severe depression. I was shocked by how common such illnesses can be, regardless of race or community background.

I also learned about guilt. “People feel guilty if they failed to get help for their lost loved one,” a counselor told me, and they feel guilty if they did get help and the loved one killed him or herself anyway. It is best to seek help. Whether you believe it or not, you have too much to lose.

8136: Diverse GOP Not An Oxymoron.

From The Chicago Tribune…

A GOP not for ‘whites only’

By Clarence Page

What’s the most overlooked, underappreciated story from the midterm elections? My nominee would be the surprising new racial and ethnic diversity of Republican congressional and gubernatorial winners — even if we don’t see as much diversity among the party’s voters.

Republican contenders-of-color had a history-making night, which helps undermine the notion that the GOP is becoming a whites-only party. It’s hard to say how much help the new diversity will be in winning over more nonwhite voters. But it already appears to be helping party leaders to become more comfortable with an increasingly multiracial, multicultural voting population. If their success at attracting ethnic minority candidates keeps up, it could attract nonwhite voters, too.

For example, South Carolina’s Tim Scott and Florida’s Allen West became the first African-American Republicans to be sent to Congress from their states in more than a century. They also are the first black Republicans to join the House or Senate since Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma retired in 2003.

Cuban-American Marco Rubio of Florida was elected the Senate’s only Hispanic Republican, since Florida’s Mel Martinez retired last year.

In the House, Idaho’s Raul Labrador, Florida’s David Rivera, Texas’ Bill Flores and Francisco Canseco and Washington state’s Jaime Herrera will join re-elected Florida Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart for a record total of eight Republican Latinos in both chambers, according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. That will bring the total Latino representation on Capitol Hill to what the association called “a near-record 27.”

Among governors, Republican Susanna Martinez won New Mexico’s race to become the nation’s first Latina governor-elect.

Republican Nikki Haley became South Carolina’s first female governor and the nation’s second Indian-American governor after Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, also a Republican.

Rubio, West, Scott and Haley, among other conservative candidates of color, were endorsed by Sarah Palin and backed by the tea party, eroding the charge that the tea partiers are running a whites-only movement.

Only six month ago, I wrote that there were more black Republicans running for Congress than there had been since Reconstruction, partly because they were encouraged by the long-shot victory of a Democrat, President Barack Obama. If he could do it, others figured, so can I.

A dozen black Republican congressional nominees made it to the general election. Two won. Both come from predominantly white districts, which follows another post-1960s tradition. The parties have become so racially polarized since the civil rights/white backlash era that black Republicans in Congress have been elected by mostly white votes.

But there, the similarities between the House’s two new black Republicans pretty much end there. Scott, 45, a businessman and former state legislator, gained national notice by beating Paul Thurmond — son of the late segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond — to win the GOP primary in June, which in that conservative district is tantamount to victory. Despite Scott’s tea party endorsements, he campaigned in the style of a center-right moderate.

West’s speeches, by contrast, delighted the far-right by calling out Obama to “be a man” and declaring “institutional racism is dead.” A 49-year-old retired Army lieutenant colonel, West became a hero on the right after he was disciplined for firing a weapon near the head of a detainee he was interrogating for important information about explosive devices. “If it’s about the lives of my men and their safety,” he famously told his defense attorney, “I’d go through hell with a gasoline can.”

Quotes like that tell me that West, in particular, is going to be fun for journalists to cover. He also represents the tiger that establishment Republican leaders have by the tail as they try to please tea party members of all colors. At a time when the party is wooing the votes of moderate swing voters, their right wing expects some heavy-duty payback for its help in bringing conservative voters to the polls.

Things were a lot less complicated for Republicans when they were simply the “Party of No.”

8111: Politically Correct Not Always Right.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Why PC is such a pain, no offense

By Clarence Page

Political correctness may be the biggest stealth issue in this political season, partly because people are afraid to talk about it.

For example, a new poll by Rasmussen Reports finds that 74 percent of the Americans surveyed regard political correctness as “a problem” — and 57 percent believe the country has become “too politically correct.”

How did the pollsters define “politically correct”? They didn’t. The respondents were left to define PC any way they wanted and, whatever that happened to be, most of them didn’t like it.

PC is like flu season: Everybody hates it, but it keeps coming back. We try to inoculate ourselves the best we can, hoping we don’t get hit by some new, unexpected strains of offense.

Witness, for example, then-Sen. Joe Biden’s irritating many African-Americans in 2008 with an unfortunately condescending-sounding use of the words “clean” and “articulate” to compliment then-Sen. Barack Obama. At least Biden wound up with the vice presidency.

Biden’s presence came in handy when President Obama found himself offending conservatives by saying the Cambridge, Mass., police behaved “stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates at his home. Everybody hates PC, it seems, yet everybody seems to have his or her own version of it.

Political correctness generally is defined as a ban, usually unwritten, against language or practices that could offend women, minorities and other legally or socially protected groups.

Personally I prefer to call it by the old-fashioned label that my parents taught me: good manners.

But PC becomes more problematic when it tries to codify what’s going to offend people or even violate rights when people and situations can be so different.

Efforts to protect one group sometimes can offend others, as in Grand Rapids, Mich., where state civil rights officials are investigating an unnamed 33-year-old woman for posting an advertisement at her church last July seeking a “Christian roommate.”

That violates fair housing laws, the director of the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan told Fox News. “No exemptions.”

You don’t have to be paranoid to wonder whether cases like that are filed by somebody who deliberately wants to make fair housing laws look bad.

On the other hand, you have cases like Carl Paladino, New York’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, who declares, “I’m not politically correct,” in ways that make political correctness look good.

He proudly espoused his opposition to PC when asked, for example, about sexually and racially charged e-mails he had forwarded to friends. One of his missives famously featured a Photoshopped picture of Barack and Michelle Obama as a pimp and hooker. Not too classy.

But, alas, in a democracy, unlike the private sector, voters can decide what’s politically correct in their candidates.

Besides, if politics doesn’t work out for Paladino, for example, he received an offer from Hustler publisher Larry Flynt to be the porn magazine’s executive editor, Politico.com reports. “It’s clear he’s better suited to join our team,” said Flynt, “than be the governor of the state of New York.”

That’s why I think PC is a stealth issue in these midterm elections. Although all political sides have their own versions of political correctness, liberal PC further enrages the already-aroused right when they sense, for example, that it protects Obama from criticism.

Tea party movement supporters, for example, don’t like to have their nonracial concerns about taxes and government spending dismissed as “racist” — and liberals don’t like to have their concerns about health care and job stimulus dismissed as “elitist.”

Today’s PC battles date back largely to the 1960s. By the end of the decade, traditional partisan differences about how government should be run were recast into a culture war between self-styled forces of good and evil that over time have became even more polarized.

The actor Hal Holbrook once said he hates PC because “it causes us to lie silently instead of saying what we think.” We’d be better off discussing what we think openly, candidly and sensibly, if we aren’t too afraid to talk.

7433: Rating Reid’s Remarks.

From The Chicago Tribune…

What Negro Problem?

By Clarence Page

What’s the big deal with Harry Reid’s comments about Obama?

President Obama says “the book is closed” on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s newly disclosed problematic praise of Obama in 2008. But Republican Chairman Michael Steele and a host of conservative pundits are not about to let it go.

“He said what? Harry and the Negro” blares a Drudge Report headline.

The conservative Weekly Standard quotes a 2002 Chicago Defender account of Obama’s criticism of former Republican Senate Leader Trent Lott on WVON — and notes ominously “If Mitch McConnell had said it…”

In other words, if current Senate GOP leader McConnell had said what Reid said, Dems would want his head.

GOP Chairman Steele, a gaffe-bag in his own right, called Reid’s remarks racist on Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC and claimed a “double standard” by Dems to give Reid a pass for “anachronistic language” that is “out of step with where America is today.”

Really, Mr. Chairman? Let us remember the context of Reid’s remarks. However blunt he may have been, he was praising Obama. Lott was praising Sen. Strom Thurmond’s defense of racial segregation laws.

And if Mitch McConnell had praised Obama the way Reid did? That would not be a gaffe; It would be a political miracle.

Elsewhere, some conservatives are comparing Obama’s defense of Reid to his call for radio host Don Imus to be fired for describing Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” Yes, Obamaphobes can be that tone deaf.

Ed Morrissey at the Hot Air blog says Reid questioned Obama’s “authenticity.” No, but Reid’s conservative critics appear to think complexion and “Negro accent” are marks of “authenticity,” when such standards are convenient to their cause.

Not to say that liberals don’t do the same thing when it is convenient. Witness the questions during the early Democratic primaries about whether Obama was “black enough.” All’s fair in mudball politics.

One thing for which conservatives should thank Obama: After years of being called racist, rightly or wrongly, by prominent liberal black leaders, he’s given them opportunities to turn the tables, whether it is deserved or not.

7277: The Specter Of Racism.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Race haunts politics
Will it ever be OK to go there without name-calling?

By Clarence Page

He takes it back. In a recent interview Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that, if he had it to do over again, he might have chosen another less incendiary word than “cowards” in his now-notorious Black History Month speech to describe the way Americans tend to avoid candid talk about race.

I wasn’t surprised. Public backlash over his use of the C-word gave him a fast lesson in why so many of us Americans have become too cowardly to talk candidly about race. We’re afraid of being called “politically incorrect” or outright “racist.”

Yet, we can’t shrug off the baggage of history that easily. Questions about race keep coming up, since race continues to be a subtext of our politics like little land mines of “gotcha” moments—like the one on which Holder stepped.

You can hear it in the question that haunts the mostly white makeup of populist conservatives in the anti-tax tea party rallies, the August town hall protests and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s book signings: How much does race have to do with it?

A racial streak always has haunted populist politics. But in most of today’s uprising by populist conservatives, race is only a marker, if a highly visible one, for other differences that have defined American politics since at least the 1960s.

If there was ever a time we should be talking candidly about race it is now. Yet, it is considered bad manners at best or even racist at worst to ask how much of today’s protests of President Barack Obama’s policies might be motivated by race. People are touchy for at least three good reasons: One, race is so hard to quantify; two, the protests are more ideological than racial; and three, most Americans have little tolerance for outright bigotry anymore.

Polls offer limited help. Obama’s approval ratings have fallen in the November polls by Gallup and Public Policy Polling while Palin’s have risen. At this rate, they might even meet somewhere in the high 40s, a Drudge Report headline trumpets.

But what’s race got to do with that? Much of Obama’s fall results from recent bad news on the employment and Afghanistan fronts and much of Palin’s rise results from her highly touted book tour. Still, since almost all of Obama’s decline has come from white voters, while his numbers among blacks and Hispanics have stayed virtually the same, many still ask how much the difference results from the issue of race.

In some cases, the nuances as to what’s racist or what isn’t draw distinctions without much of a significant difference. Take, for example, the anti-Obama billboard that auto dealer Phil Wolf erected recently in Wheat Ridge, Colo. In big letters it says, “BIRTH CERTIFICATE” and “PROVE IT,” a reference to the goofy movement that questions Obama’s natural-born citizenship despite overwhelming evidence. It also features two cartoonish images of Obama wearing a turban and reads “President or Jihad?” and “Wake Up America! Remember Ft. Hood.”

In interviews Wolf has said he’s convinced Obama is a secret Muslim, a view that Pew Research Center polls have shown about 11 percent of the population shares. Would they feel that way about a white president with Obama’s background? Frankly, it’s not hard to imagine, considering the paranoid streak in American politics that has nurtured worse myths about previous presidents.

Maybe that’s what my friend and MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews was thinking when he blurted out during coverage of the 1,500 people waiting for Palin at a Grand Rapids, Mich., bookstore that “they look like a white crowd to me” and “not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it is pretty monochromatic up there” and “I think there is a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, white versus other people.”

Conservative bloggers took umbrage at that, for all the understandable reasons of racial ambiguity that I listed above. You’re not a racist just because everybody around you happens to be of the same race as you. Yet, as political demographics take shape, there is a tribal aspect to politics. Birds of a feather flock together, social scientists tell us, and so do people.

Today’s American tribes gather for reasons of shared values, interests and attitudes more than race or other shared ancestry. Yet, our ancestral differences play a big role in shaping our present-day attitudes. That’s why we need to talk more openly and candidly about race, if we can only find the right language to do it.

7104: Obama’s Critics Lie?

From The Chicago Tribune…

Fiery rhetoric of Obama’s critics

By Clarence Page

People are asking, but President Barack Obama’s White House team denies that racism has anything to do with the protests against his health-care reform plan. That’s smart. The same approach worked during last year’s presidential campaign. In public, Team Obama constantly said race didn’t matter, while in private the team never forgot that it mattered a lot.

Race still matters, although it’s not always easy to say how much. Why do some people think, for example, that the “9/12 Project” tea party protests on the Washington Mall were racially tinged? Maybe it was the sign that television networks photographed that said, as I remember the quote, “The zoo has an African [lion]; The U.S. has a lyin’ African.”

Other signs promoted the idea that Obama is not really a natural born citizen or that maybe he should just die.

But, in fairness, most of the signs weren’t like that. I’m sure most of the folks who showed up in the Mall didn’t have race first and foremost on their minds. Yet, their efforts to appear racism-free seemed downright poignant at times.

For example, somebody made the effort to produce some preprinted signs that offered helpfully: “Not a race issue, Not a party issue, Just an old American freedom issue.” Dear sign carriers: I’m sure you mean well, but every time a black American of my generation hears someone say, “It’s not a race issue,” I immediately think, “Yup, it’s a race issue.”

The great success of the civil rights revolution was to make discrimination illegal and make any sign of racism taboo in decent society. Yet, as serious racism receded, suspicions of racism rushed in to fill the gap. People are afraid to talk about race for fear of offending someone, and if you bring it up you risk being accused of playing the race card.

Yet, it strikes me that one of the byproducts of having a black president is how many white people I know are learning what it feels like to be black in a society that constantly is telling you that something is not a race issue when you so plainly and clearly think it is.

For example, my column-writing colleague Maureen Dowd of The New York Times arched many eyebrows with this bit of mind-reading after Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, rudely blurted out “You lie!” during Obama’s health-care address to Congress: “Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber. ... Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president—no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq—convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

My response: Welcome to my world. Judging by the polls, about 15 percent or so of the country was in shock and even ran to gun shops to stock up, according to news reports, when they heard Obama won the presidential race. Some of them naturally show up at protests like the 9/12 march and buy “I’m with Joe Wilson” T-shirts. I just hope Wilson’s new fans are still happy when they have to go dig up their birth certificates and prove their citizenship just to get some health care.

Yet, on a more cheerful note, a scene you probably did not see on TV happened after the protests as the mostly white protesters wandered home through the nearby Black Family Reunion, an annual two-day street fair on the Mall. Although it sounds like a setup for a zany Hollywood movie, everyone was civil and courteous. Some of the protesters mingled and bought some lunch. That’s the Washington way: Never let political differences get in the way of a good meal. There’s a valuable lesson in civility. Appetizing too.

In judging Obama’s performance, it would be wrong to make too much of the role played by race, although it would be foolish to make too little of it. Team Obama came into office with a lot of defensive boasting about the big jobs they had to do with two wars, economic catastrophe and a broken health-care system, among other disasters. How do you separate the impact of Obama being the nation’s first black president from that of his being the first to take on such a big load of hot-button issues?

Yet, I am amused by conservatives like talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh who insist racism has nothing to do with Obama’s problems. Only a few months ago they were blaming white guilt for his success. Folks, you can’t have it both ways.

7088: Beating Up The Joneses.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Slinging mud

By Clarence Page

Score one for the right wing. Conservative witch hunters, notably Fox News’ Glenn Beck, are claiming victory for hounding President Barack Obama’s green jobs czar out of office. Yet the victory also highlights a gaping deficit in America’s conservative movement. They’ve become more adept in recent years at trashing liberal ideas than at coming up with some new ones of their own.

Van Jones, a San Francisco Bay Area activist for environment-friendly “green-collar” industries, resigned as the president’s special adviser for environmental jobs after weeks of mud slung against him by Beck and other conservative media pundits. Jones’ credentials are outstanding, but these are politically polarized times. At a time when nervous parents were threatening to pull their children out of school, for example, ironically to avoid hearing Obama speak about the value of education, the outspokenly progressive Jones hardly had a chance.

Jones is a bright, charismatic organizer who came up from a small-town Tennessee childhood to graduate from Yale Law School and become a rising star in the world of environmental activism. He’s the author of a New York Times best seller, “The Green Collar Economy,” and was named by Time Magazine this year as one of the “100 most influential people in the world” and by Fast Company magazine last year as one of the “12 most creative minds.”

Like Obama, Jones has a knack for reaching across lines of race, class and political parties—until now, anyway—to create jobs and help save the environment. At the center of his vision is the creation of green-collar jobs, a phrase he popularized for jobs that can provide family-supporting wages, upward mobility to higher skills and help save the planet too.

”We’re asking questions progressives like but we’re giving answers that conservatives should like,” he said at last month’s National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas. “We’re not talking about expanding welfare, we’re talking about expanding work. We’re not talking about expanding entitlements, we’re talking about expanding enterprise and investments. … We should be able to stand together and be one country on this.”

Yes, we should. But while Jones was calling for “one country,” Beck and Co. were digging into his background like a political campaign’s hit squad to smear Jones as a “communist-anarchist radical.” Yes, Jones dabbled in radical politics in his younger days, but that was then. Beck and Co. don’t think much of political redemption, at least not when it is claimed by someone who is not on their side.

Most embarrassing to Washington etiquette are YouTube videos of Jones speaking his mind before he was appointed to his White House post. They include a well-publicized vulgarity that starts with “a” and has an “h” in the middle. He employed the a-word to describe Republicans during a February meeting. He has apologized, but the flap made him too big a headache for the Obama White House. He also apologized for signing a petition in 2004 that called for further investigation of the Bush administration’s actions before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Significantly, Jones’ remarks hardly ventured further to the left than Beck’s rambling commentaries swerve to the far right. But Beck’s a talk-show host. When he goes over the top and accuses Obama of “deep-seated hatred of white people,” as Beck did recently without offering evidence to back it up, he gets bigger ratings. A presidential appointee would get the ax.

But the larger significance of Jones’ departure is what it says about the conservatives who helped push him out. Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at the conservative National Review, sounds frustrated. “Republicans have a high degree of unity these days, which has been very helpful in opposing liberal initiatives such as the stimulus and the Democrats’ health-care legislation,” he writes in the magazine’s current issue. “The downside of that unity is that it is less helpful in generating new ideas, some of which the party will probably need to retake power and will certainly need to exercise it productively.”

In the meantime, the GOP’s conservative base has legions of talk-show pundits to fire up their hearts, if not their minds.

6369: Black Is Beautiful 2.0?

From The Chicago Tribune…

Is black the ‘new black’?

By Clarence Page

Some compliments are hard to take.

Take, for example, Larry King’s announcement a day after President Obama’s inauguration that it is now “in” to be black.

In fact, the ageless CNN talk-show host announced during a conversation with journalist Bob Woodward and fellow talk-show host Tavis Smiley on “Larry King Live” that his 8-year-old son Cannon “now says that he would like to be black.”

Woodward and Smiley burst into what sounded like slightly cautious laughter. “There’s a lot of advantages to being black,” King continued, beaming with fatherly pride. “Black is in. Is this a turning of the tide?”

Not to me. As a black parent, I’ve lived through this movie, only in reverse racial roles. When our son was 4, he came home from preschool one day to announce that he wanted to be a “white policeman” when he grew up.

His mother and I tried not to sound shocked, despite our imagined horrors of a budding racial-identity crisis damaging our son’s sense of self. Besides, I had already learned that if you react to something shocking that your kid says, he will only say it again.

Instead, I quietly reached for a how-to manual by psychiatrists James P. Comer of Yale and Alvin Poussaint of Harvard on raising black children. The book just happened to include a response to a black parent whose 4-year-old wanted to be white.

The good doctors’ remedy? “Relax,” they said.

It turns out that it is quite normal for children of all races to become aware of color differences at age 4, but they don’t attach any value to it. It is left to us, their elders, to teach them to love, hate or give everyone a fair chance to prove his or herself.

And the reverse also was true, Comer and Poussaint pointed out: It is not unusual for white kids to want to be black, if their personal heroes happen to be black.

Indeed, at that time 15 years ago, my son’s best friend was a 5-year-old blond-haired, blue-eyed kid in our neighborhood who was firmly convinced, as his dad put it, that “he is Michael Jordan.”

For King, cross-racial tourism by kids appears to be a new experience. That would explain his amazement and apparent ignorance of a pesky unwritten rule in today’s political correctness: Let no racial praise go unpunished.

It was King’s casual assertion that there’s “a lot of advantages” to being black that stirred the biggest uproar of Internet chatter. A Huffington Post writer fumed, “As soon as sonny boy gets passed over for jobs, opportunities, promotions, loans—snubbed, driven by, underestimated, charged more, ignored by doctors, success looked at with surprise and asked constantly if he plays basketball—he’ll go right back to spending his white daddy’s money.”

Ah, yes, as much as the world welcomes America’s first president of known African descent, it is more than a little early to declare blackness to be an advantage. In fact, if Barack Obama screws up, I suspect that we won’t see another black president for another hundred years.

For now, I am not shocked that King’s kid would think being black might give him some sort of advantage. It is a mark of our progress as Americans that today’s kids can grow up with images of black, successful role models.

But ironically, the more success we black Americans show in this country, the harder it becomes for us to convince anyone that being black is a terrible handicap. To paraphrase an old song, nobody knows the troubles they have not seen.

By now you may have noticed, dear reader, that it’s hard to joke about race these days, even when the humor obviously is good-natured and free of malice. Joe Biden could tell you that. Back when the master of foot-in-mouth-surprises was still a Democratic senator from Delaware, he famously derailed his own presidential campaign momentum with a well-meaning but racially naive compliment of Obama as “clean” and “articulate.” What sounded like praise to Biden sounded like condescension to quite a few black Americans.

Obama didn’t hold it against Biden, as evidenced by his choosing him as his running mate. Yet the episode left an important lesson: We can’t move into a truly post-racial future without a vocabulary that can help us to talk more frankly about our racially troubled past.

6132: Crying For Change.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Jackson’s Eloquent Tears

By Clarence Page

Was Rev. Jesse Jackson crying tears of joy at President-elect Barack Obama’s victory celebration in Grant Park? Or was the civil rights leader weeping in regret that he might now be out of a job?

Caught by television cameras, Jackson’s tears spoke volumes. It is important to remember that Jackson helped to pave the way for Obama. But, like some other old-school leaders, Jackson has been slow to recognize when to step out of the way.

For example, his most memorable contribution to Obama’s presidential campaign came when Jackson’s whispered wish to “cut his nuts off” was caught by a hot Fox News microphone. Jackson apologized profusely. No problem. His gaffe undoubtedly reassured skeptical whites that Obama was not a Jackson clone.

Much was said about how Obama was opening a “post-racial” era, although “multiracial” is more appropriate. Race and racism have not evaporated. Nor has the need for diversity to be respected, not just tolerated. Jackson’s not out of a job yet. But Obama’s victory moves our old baseline of racial expectations to a higher and happier level. It’s hard to argue that our society is irredeemably racist when our multiracial electorate just elected a man with African roots and an Arabic-sounding name to be commander in chief.

Yes, we did.

No, Obama did not win over a majority of white males, according to exit polls. Neither have the previous five Democratic nominees. But with 41 percent of white men and about half of all white women and independents, Obama outperformed the other five among those groups.

He also did better than John Kerry and Al Gore among Hispanics and all income brackets, including a 5 percent gain since 2004 among those who earn less than $50,000 a year and an 8 percent gain in the over-$100,000-a-year income group, according to the Pew Research Center. Sorry, Joe the Plumber.

Pew also reports that Obama increased voter turnout since 2004 among self-identified Republicans (up 3 percent), moderates (up 6 percent) and conservatives (up 5 percent).

But that doesn’t mean that Obama’s contest with Sen. John McCain was the “referendum on the goodness of America,” that conservative MSNBC commentator Tucker Carlson sarcastically complained that the media portrayed it.

“I just resent the implication that America is a better country if it voted for Barack Obama,” he grumped on Election Night. “That’s a slur on people who voted against Obama.” Agreed. Yet, as one McCain voter who joined the celebration of Obama’s victory told me, he was not happy that his man lost but that “our country has won.” America is a better country, in other words, not because so many of us voted for Obama but because many more of us have made a place where Obama’s victory is possible.

In Kenya, by contrast, Obama’s father’s minority Luo tribe celebrated, but with a bitter knowledge that it is easier for a Luo to be elected president in America than in Kenya.

“Only in America,” Americans said with a new sense of pride. It certainly was better to see folks overseas happily waving our flag instead of burning it.

Back here at home, Pew found the only major group that went the other way, giving fewer votes to this year’s Democratic nominee, was voters who were older than 65. Significantly, that generation includes much of our 1960s-era civil rights leadership. When skeptical black political and civil rights leaders questioned Obama’s “blackness,” Obama persevered, forcing some black leaders, like Jackson, to catch up with the masses whom they were trying to lead.

Obama had an advantage in his quest, I suspect, in his lack of a family ancestry in American slavery, a defining characteristic of most African-Americans. Being raised by his white mother and grandparents in multiracial Hawaii and Indonesia, he was spared the post-slavery traumatic syndrome that for many of us African-Americans has been a cultural crippler. Many of us older folks were conditioned at an early era about our “place” in a white-dominated society in ways that culturally cripple many of our offspring, if the young’uns bother to listen to us at all.

Obama was spared all that, judging by his autobiographies. Although he was born an American, his multiracial view, energized with optimism, is characteristic of immigrants. While others rail relentlessly about America’s limitations, he remains resolutely focused on our possibilities. He has enlisted us, his fellow Americans, in his cause and given all of us a good reason to feel like winners.

5627: Well, There You Go, Don Imus.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Don Imus’ offensive defense

By Clarence Page

For a guy who makes his living as a professional talker, the topic of race seems to leave Don Imus oddly tongue-tied.

In case you haven’t kept up, the pioneer “shock jock” has been broadcasting a new morning show on WABC-AM since last fall, months after he was fired from MSNBC and CBS Radio for proclaiming that the Rutgers University women’s basketball team looked like “nappy-headed hos.”

He returned to work with profuse on-air apologies and a pledge to foster an open dialogue on race relations on his new show. On Monday he fostered the sort of dialogue he had not counted on.

Or maybe he did. Listening to the on-air chatter that has stirred up another racial eruption, I had to wonder whether it was just another bonehead mistake or a brilliant publicity stunt.

On Monday’s show, sportscaster Warner Wolf was talking about how the Dallas Cowboys football player formerly known as Adam “Pacman” Jones no longer wants to be called “Pacman.” Jones is turning over a new leaf after having been suspended for a season and arrested six times.

Then Imus inexplicably injected race into the conversation:

“What color is he?” asked Imus.

“He’s African-American,” said Wolf, sounding a bit bemused.

“Well, there you go,” said Imus. “Now we know.”

Huh? That’s it? You might ask, “Now we know what?” Imus did not say. The omission left the rest of us to wonder whether Imus was expressing some sort of soft bigotry of criminal expectations in regard to black athletes.

It didn’t take all day for Rev. Al Sharpton to call the remarks “very disturbing” and say, “We are looking into this.” Sharpton led the campaign to have Imus fired last year from his national CBS Radio show and its simulcast on MSNBC.

Jones said he was upset by the remarks and would “pray” for the radio star.

But Imus insisted that those of us who heard something racist in his remarks heard him wrong. He said he actually was defending Jones, whom Imus thought was being picked on because of his race.

On his radio show the next day, Imus said he was trying to “make a sarcastic point” about the unfair treatment of blacks in the criminal justice system but had been misunderstood.

“What people should be outraged about is that they arrest blacks for no reason,” Imus said Tuesday. “I mean, there’s no reason to arrest this kid six times. Maybe he did something once, but everyone does something once.”

Calling the criticism “ridiculous,” Imus pointed out how his program’s cast is now more diverse than ever. It includes a black producer and two black co-hosts—one male and one female. Still, after his troubles last year, you might think he’d be extra careful about clarifying his sentiments the first time, especially on topics having anything to do with race, instead of letting his insinuations (“well, there you go; now we know”) hang heavily in the air.

Instead, he finds himself trying to explain why what he meant to say was different from what we may have heard him say.

If he was looking for attention—and what entertainer isn’t?—he could hardly have dreamed up a more slippery way to do it. Even the remarks that he said he intended to say exposed some of our society’s deepest racial wounds.

For example, just as it is offensive to imply that blacks are more criminal than whites, it is also offensive to imply that blacks are arrested “for no reason,” if you don’t back up the assertion. If “there’s no reason to arrest this kid six times,” that, too, begs for an explanation. Otherwise, Imus seemed to be committing the same offense of which Sharpton is often accused: exploiting serious issues like race, crime and overpampered athletes and shedding more heat than light.

Ironically, if Imus wants to put his edgy humor to the cause of fostering a helpful dialogue on race, he needs to get serious. He could take some valuable tips from George Carlin, a master of the art of humor who died Sunday at age 71. The envelope-pushing Carlin will be sorely missed by those of us who appreciate humor that also makes you think. Whether you agreed with him or not, you knew where Carlin stood. Imus, by contrast, has a self-defeating habit of shooting from the lip—and firing blanks.

Essay 4711

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Focus on hate crime is far too narrow

By Clarence Page

WASHINGTON—Here’s one from the “Taste of His Own Medicine” department: When the Rev. Al Sharpton led a recent Washington rally to protest what he called lax federal prosecution of hate crimes, at least one local black resident was waiting with a protest of his own.

Amid recent reports of noose hangings and other racial incidents, Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and other activists rallied outside the Department of Justice Friday to call for tougher federal prosecutions of hate crimes.

Shane Johnson, 32, a social worker by day and Weblogger on the side, staged a nearby dissent with a few sympathizers. He supported the prosecution of hate crimes, he said, but thinks Sharpton’s definition of “hate” is too narrow. Johnson didn’t draw much attention and he wasn’t surprised. “Most people view me as taking on the black establishment,” he told me in a telephone interview. “They think I am going to embarrass our leaders. My view is that they should be embarrassed.”

Maybe they should. I share Johnson’s outrage. Why, I often have wondered, do we black folks get so much more agitated about white-on-black insults than the black-on-black assaults that constantly terrorize certain neighborhoods?

Johnson is part of a new “netroots” movement of black-oriented Web sites that has created a virtual civil rights movement. Aided by black talk-radio hosts, they stirred the national protests that led to a march that the mainstream media could not ignore in Jena, La. That’s the town where six black youths were charged with the beating of a white youth. The hanging of nooses in a schoolyard tree provoked a series of nasty racial episodes.

Sharpton wants tough federal prosecution of hate-related crimes, like the hanging of nooses. Fine, says Johnson. But Johnson also asks why national black leaders have paid so little attention to a more recent campaign in the black netroots: the beating and rape of a 35-year-old Haitian woman and the beating and sexual assault of her 12-year-old son by up to 10 assailants in West Palm Beach, Fla.

In June, armed attackers broke into her apartment in Dunbar Village, a public housing development, allegedly to retaliate for the woman's complaints about their noise and litter. They repeatedly raped and sodomized her and forced her to perform oral sex on her son, according to a grand jury indictment. They also poured household chemicals on the woman’s eyes and threatened to set the two victims on fire, according to police and news reports.

Was that a “hate” crime? It certainly wasn’t about love.

“Why is it that we can make bold statements of outrage about a few nooses,” Johnson said. “But not about this 35-year-old woman who is trying to make a life for herself and her son in Florida?”

Why, indeed? State and federal hate-crime laws are not written to include such traditional varieties of hate-filled violence. The term “hate crime,” coined in the 1980s, usually describes crimes clearly motivated by racism, anti-Semitism and other biases against racial or ethnic minorities. Johnson decided to take a public stand for the inclusion of hate-filled violence against women, although he didn’t expect many to stand with him—at least not in public.

Instead, civil rights leaders and those of us whom they purport to represent often seem to be too benumbed by black-inflicted terrors that we have given up trying to fight. As another mother at Dunbar Village told an Associated Press reporter: “So a lady was raped? Big deal. There’s too much other crime happening here.”

Sadly, those who seek deliverance from such horrors are increasingly isolated from those who might best be equipped to offer hope. That message comes through loud and clear in a new Pew Charitable Trust poll of American attitudes about race. Sixty-one percent of the black Americans surveyed said values between poor and middle-class blacks are moving too far apart to be viewed as their having a common black experience. Only 41 percent expressed that view in a similar 1986 poll.

Differing values are a natural consequence of America’s growing class divide. Yet that divide comes across more dramatically in black America, where poverty is more concentrated and a colorful “gangsta” hip-hop culture receives widespread and highly lucrative promotion by major entertainment media.

That gangsta culture punishes those who don’t “stop snitching,” to quote a popular inner-city T-shirt slogan, even when the victims are innocent neighbors. A lot of us black Americans would like to take back our streets. We could use a little more help from our leaders.

Essay 4594

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Don’t get hung up on nooses in the news

By Clarence Page

Nooses are in the news lately. I’m relieved that no one has been found hanging from any of them.

All that any lamebrain has to do in order to make news, it seems, is to tie a rope into a noose and hang the knotty symbol of segregation-era lynchings in a conspicuous place.

A news database search of “noose” quickly turned up one found recently at a Long Island police station locker room, another in a tree on the University of Maryland campus and another in a black Coast Guard cadet’s bag aboard a cutter. A noose found on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University led to a student-led anti-racism rally, which national news cameras dutifully covered.

Reported noose sightings have risen nationally in the months since nooses dangling from a schoolyard tree raised racial tensions in Jena, La. Or maybe it is just the reports of noose sightings that have risen. Since thousands of demonstrators, including Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, descended on Jena for a highly publicized march in September, news media seem to be running to noose stories like children to a candy truck.

Unfortunately racism is not easily covered by conventional news media these days. Television dramatically conveyed the binary good-versus-evil issues at stake in the fight against segregation in the 1950s and ‘60s. Today’s issues are more complicated and, if anything, better suited to radio, which can provide an insightful theater of the mind when its power is not being hijacked by demagogues.

TV is better equipped to cover sports than civil rights. In sports, players on a level field strive to compete against accepted standards of excellence in front of viewers who share a common base of information. Disputes in sports usually are argued in terms of inches and seconds. Disputes about race are more nuanced and complicated. We don’t have commonly shared rule books. Instead, our knowledge is based on personal experiences that are vastly different.

“This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation,” a University of Louisiana senior who was in Jena told The New York Times. “You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves.”

Sorry, young man, but I knew the ‘60s. This is not them. Today’s America has come a long way since the segregated bad old days. For that, we can thank the hard-won victories of the civil rights movement. Racism hasn’t disappeared, but it is getting harder to identify, especially when our vision of the future is clouded by old symbols from the past.

Still, the return of the noose to public view and national news should remind us, for example, of what a relic the old knotted rope has become.

Today’s young black males kill more young black males in a year than the Ku Klux Klan killed in its entire history. Historians have documented more than 4,700 lynchings of African-Americans, mostly in the South, between 1882 and 1968. In 2005, the latest full year of FBI statistics, almost 8,000 black Americans were murdered, mostly by other black Americans.

It is an ironic sign of progress that the white knuckleheads who made history by making nooses have been driven into the shadows. They hang nooses, then run and hide. The terror inflicted by our black knuckleheads stays with us.

In black America, today’s debate often is defined as a choice between such iconic figures as Sharpton and actor-turned-activist Bill Cosby. Cosby has co-authored a new book with Alvin F. Poussaint of Harvard University’s Medical School called “Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors.” The black community’s most urgent problems, they argue, are rooted in a self-defeating culture of violence and victimhood. Whereas Rev. Al calls on us to reform “the system,” Cos says we need more personal responsibility. That’s a false debate. We obviously need to do both.

We have a personal responsibility to fix the system when and where it is broken. We also need to fix what is broken in our families and communities, whether TV covers it or not. Otherwise we’re hanging a noose around our own necks.

Essay 4550

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Doubting Isiah Thomas’ defense

By Clarence Page

As the steamy story of Isiah Thomas’ sexual harassment suit unfolded, I could not help but wonder what his mother would think.

The first time I really paid attention to the retired NBA star and current New York Knicks coach was back in 1989 when his mother’s life story was dramatized in an NBC-TV movie, “A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story.”

Alfre Woodard depicted the feisty mom who raised her children alone on Chicago’s West Side after separating from her husband. When the Vice Lords street gang came to recruit her sons, she memorably greeted the gang-bangers with a shotgun and a threat to blow their sorry selves across the nearby expressway.

“First off, you have to keep an eye on your children,” she said in a 1990 Ebony magazine article on how to save inner-city children from gangs. “… Parents have to set examples. You can’t hang around the taverns and expect your children to behave differently.”

Sure enough. Young Isiah, (now 46) launched into a full-tribute mama-thon on the witness stand, describing to the jury how Mama Thomas taught her boys to respect women.

In the end, his memories of mother appeared to have helped Thomas’ case. When the three-week trial ended last week, a jury of four women and three men found in favor of the plaintiff, but let Thomas off the hook for paying damages.

The owners of the New York Knicks, however, were ordered to pay $11.6 million to Anucha Browne Sanders, 44, a former team executive who was fired from her $260,000-a-year job. The firing came after she endured a hostile work environment, she said, including crude insults and unwanted advances from Thomas, who denied the charges.

But what brought Thomas’ mother to mind was an unnecessary but explosive revelation by Coach Thomas during his video deposition. In his version of etiquette, he revealed, it’s wrong for a black man to call a black woman a “bitch,” but much worse for a white man to do it.

“A white man calling a black woman a bitch, … that is a problem for me,” he said. But when asked in a follow-up if he would be bothered by a black man’s using the same put-down, he said, “Not as much. I’m sorry to say. I do make a distinction.”

Don Imus, consider yourself vindicated.

Imus, you may recall, lost his nationally syndicated radio show in the uproar over his referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” The I-man claimed to have gotten his defamatory words from hip-hop. That still doesn’t excuse his unsporting attack on a defenseless women’s basketball team. But if my fellow black folks don’t object to anyone, including sports stars and rappers, who spew such insults against women, we virtually admit to the same double-standard that Thomas says he is “sorry to say” he employs.

At least Rev. Al Sharpton, to whom Imus appealed almost as an unofficial arbiter of black feelings, “unequivocally” condemned Thomas’ comments. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson or the recent multitudes of mostly black protesters against unequal justice in Jena, La., to turn out against Thomas or in support of Sanders.

Don’t expect black sports fans to burn their Knicks tickets in protest or call for Thomas to be ousted from his job like Imus was. Sanders is more likely to be vilified as some sort of Jezebel, sent perhaps by white conspirators to “bring another brother down.”

Just ask Anita Hill. When U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas dismissed Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment as a “high-tech lynching,” his approval ratings in polls of black Americans shot up to about 55 percent from around 40 percent. The Senate barely confirmed him as a Supreme Court justice.

Imus was vulgar but black popular culture wrote his script. In the early 1970s, films like “Superfly” and “The Mack” glamorized and glorified the sleazy worlds of drug dealers and pimps. Despite their technical excellence, they signaled the beginning of a long slide from a period of rebellious politics into a sexist rebellion against self-respect that today infects the popular culture of a new generation.

Isiah Thomas’ blase attitude toward the B-word tells us this attitude has infected top sports management. I don’t know what his mother would say. But I know mine would not be happy.

Essay 4523

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Giving soft bigotry a break

By Clarence Page

Does ignorance about race make you a racist? That boiling question bubbles at the heart of the controversy that Fox News star Bill O’Reilly’s kicked up with his poorly received compliments of black diners in a New York restaurant. My answer is, no, ignorance about race does not always make you a racist, but it can make you sound like one.

That’s O’Reilly’s problem. O’Reilly has been vilified recently by the liberal-leaning Web site Media Matters for America for insinuating how surprised he was to discover how (Gasp!) civilized black folks behaved while dining in Sylvia’s, one of (Double gasp!) Harlem’s best-known restaurants.

“I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City,” he marveled. “I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship.”

Yup, they had knives, forks and everything! Just like white folks!

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people [who] were sitting there,” he said, “and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

Nope, no lap dancing, either.

“There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-F-er, I want more iced tea!’” O’Reilly said, sounding almost disappointed.

No, ignorance about race might not make you a racist. It only makes you ignorant. That’s why I think O’Reilly deserves a break. When someone is ignorant you should try to teach them. Instead, a lot of otherwise good-hearted, fair-minded and charitable people want to tar and feather O’Reilly.

Peace, people. I know O’Reilly. I’ve argued with him about various topics on his radio and TV shows. I relish a good “gotcha” moment against inflated egos as much as anyone does. But I also believe that this Sylvia’s kerfuffle is a bum rap.

You see, in the context of a later lengthy chat with author Juan Williams, a black National Public Radio reporter and Fox News commentator, O’Reilly wasn’t trying to sound racist. Quite the opposite, he actually was criticizing all of those white people who don’t personally know many black folks.

What O’Reilly doesn’t seem to understand is the weariness black Americans feel over constantly being compared to our community’s worst role models.

That’s a big reason why it seems curious that O’Reilly, after years of roiling up public outrage against raunchy gangsta rappers and other frightening figures, suddenly expresses what sounds like genuine surprise that some black people are not scary at all. At worst, O’Reilly appears to be afflicted with what President Bush calls “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

But that’s OK. How else will O’Reilly, I or anybody else learn anything if we don’t make a few boneheaded mistakes once in a while? My greater fear than hearing O’Reilly talk himself into a politically incorrect hole is the silence of those afraid to say anything about race for fear of offending someone. We need more candid talk about race and class, not less.

Besides, look at his upbringing. Through no fault of his own, O’Reilly came from a socially and economically isolated background. He calls himself “working class” in his first book, “The O’Reilly Factor,” although compared with my factory laborer dad in Ohio, O’Reilly’s family was well-to-do. He grew up in white middle-class Levittown, on New York’s Long Island. Like other socially handicapped folks, O’Reilly is a product of his environment. To borrow a line from “West Side Story,” “He’s depraved on account of he’s deprived!” Liberals, of all people, should avoid blaming the victim.

Nevertheless, let’s give O’Reilly credit for trying to widen his horizons. It turns out, he was dining that night at Sylvia’s with Rev. Al Sharpton, who has made re-educating white folks his life’s work.

Does that dinner date surprise you? Who would guess that, after railing against Revs. Sharpton and Jesse Jackson as some sort of race hustlers and poverty pimps, O’Reilly would take the “A Train” up to Harlem to go cattin’ around with Rev. Al? Hey, that’s show biz. Don’t take it personally. Or seriously.

Essay 4428

From The Chicago Tribune…

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What the Duke lacrosse case has taught us

By Clarence Page

When Mike Nifong reported to jail Friday to serve a 24-hour sentence in Durham, N.C., a small band of die-hard supporters carried signs that said, “We believe in your integrity and goodness.” I wonder if they believe in the tooth fairy too.

Every wicked man is right in his own eyes, the Book of Proverbs says. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us should cheer him on.

Nifong is the former Durham County district attorney who brought the notoriously bogus rape case against three Duke University lacrosse team members, a rape case that turned out to have no rape.

In the end, the only person convicted of anything was Nifong. A breathtaking list of procedural abuses led to his disbarment, resignation and prosecution. The abuses included the withholding by his office of DNA evidence for more than nine months that proved the athletes’ innocence.

I hope Nifong spent his night in the pokey thinking about the young lives he ruined. I also hope he thought about the voters he flimflammed, along with a national audience, all so that he could be re-elected in his 40 percent black district and maximize his pension.

That narrative comes through with painful clarity in a new book, “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,” co-authored by Stuart Taylor, a National Journal columnist and Newsweek contributor, and K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY.

Nifong’s overreaching “may be the worst prosecutorial misconduct ever exposed while it was happening,” said Taylor, in an interview. Taylor was one of the early skeptics of Nifong’s case.

Like the case, the book offers a chilling portrait of how the criminal justice system can nail and punish the innocent. Usually the innocent are poor people who lack the money, connections or other resources to mount a proper defense. In its concluding chapters, the book recounts several striking examples of poor blacks and Hispanics, in particular, who were sent to Death Row but later released as a result of misconduct by prosecutors.

But it was the racial and socioeconomic lineup in the Duke case—upscale white male students accused by a poor black female stripper—that excited passions in a different ideological direction. Left-progressive activists, pundits and intellectuals allied with the prosecutor to steamroll over any presumption of the boys’ innocence.

For some petitioners and op-ed writers, the young jocks provided too convenient a target as symbols of white male hegemony, runaway testosterone and every other agenda that could be hung on them like tree ornaments. Voices as varied as The New York Times and CNN star Nancy Grace come in for a well-deserved skewering here.

Think about it. If any institutions should be engaged in the critical reasoning that it takes to analyze situations like these, weighing claims and counterclaims, and sorting out facts from rumors, it is the media and college professors. The university, of all places, should teach not only good ideas but also the rational thinking that leads one to a lifetime of producing good ideas.

In that spirit, it is important to note the solid journalism that did occur, even if it failed remarkably to have much of an impact during the months Nifong’s freight train surged ahead. Besides Taylor, there was Ed Bradley, the CBS reporter who died before the charges were dismissed, “60 Minutes” producer Michael Radutzky, and MSNBC’s Dan Abrams. Each courageously pursued the growing holes in the case, despite unsubstantiated countercharges by die-hard critics who would rather punish the messenger than listen to the uncomfortable facts.

“This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed,” said Reade Seligmann, one of the three accused Duke students. He and his teammates were fortunate to have the resources to fight back. Most defendants don’t. That’s all the more reason for those of us who believe in justice to scrupulously avoid pursuing personal agendas at the expense of the truth, no matter how much it may satisfy our preconceived notions.

Essay 4318

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Diversity is difficult, but worth the effort

By Clarence Page

Robert Putnam’s fears have come true. The Harvard political scientist worried that some people would use his latest research to argue against immigration, affirmative action and multiculturalism. Sure enough, at least one favorable commentary has popped up on the Web site of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader. But, not to worry. Putnam’s findings are valuable for sane people too.

Putnam is best known for the eye-opening “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” a 2000 best seller about Americans withdrawing from civic engagement in recent decades.

Now he has a massive new study, based on interviews with nearly 30,000 people across America, that comes up with what he called in a recent Boston Globe interview “an uncomfortable truth.”

Contrary to the cherished American notion that our racial and ethnic diversity makes the nation stronger, Putnam has found quite the opposite. The greater the diversity in a community, the less civic engagement it shows. Fewer people vote. Fewer volunteer. They give less to charity. They work together less on community projects.

And they trust each other less, says Putnam, not only across racial and ethnic lines but also within the lines. In other words, residents of the most racially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods show the least trust toward those not only of other races but also of their own race.

Does that mean people are better off living with, as the old racist mantra goes, “their own kind”? Or that we should impose a moratorium on immigration as my column-writing colleague Pat Buchanan suggests in the piece that Duke tout?

Not quite. In fact, Putnam’s first paper about his new research, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century,” makes three points perfectly clear:

(1) “Increased immigration and diversity are not only inevitable” in modern societies, he writes, “but over the long run they are also desirable. Ethnic diversity is, on balance, an important social asset,” as America’s history demonstrates.

(2) “In the short- to medium-run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital,” he writes. “Social capital” is the strength of relationships that bond you to people who are like you or connect you to people who are different from you.

(3) “In the medium- to long-run, on the other hand, successful immigrant societies create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities,” says Putnam. “Thus, the central challenge for modern, diversifying societies is to create a new, broader sense of ‘we.’”

In other words, birds of different feathers do not flock together in the short-run, but it’s worth a try. They can benefit in the long run, especially if they develop a larger, more inclusive sense of identity to, say, their community, their country or some other larger sense of purpose.

In that sense, Putnam’s “bunker buster,” as one headline writer called it, confirms what many of us already know. Living with diversity is a lot like my first days in the Army. It may not be comfortable at first, but you learn to get along.

My platoon at Ft. Dix, N.J., offered a classic Hollywood portrait of young guys plucked by draft boards of every race, region and religion. Many of us came from backgrounds that conditioned us to distrust people who didn’t look or talk like us. But, united by a common sense of mission and no-nonsense orders from the top to observe no color but Army green, we learned.

The military, religious institutions and earlier waves of American immigration provide Putnam with good examples of how Americans can learn to live comfortably with diversity. The military offers a particularly quick turnaround after the mid-1960s, when racial tensions on America's streets spilled into military outposts.

In a 1996 book “All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way,” co-authors Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler explain how. After years of trying to ignore racial differences, the Pentagon did an about-face. Everyone was ordered to be on the lookout for discrimination and other sources of racial tension or inequality. The military, once a bastion of segregation, became a model of interracial and interethnic cooperation.

Sure, diversity makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Differences cause tensions, at least in the short-run. But history shows we can come out OK, as soon as we learn how much we have in common.