According to Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama’s biggest problem is that there are too many white people in this picture.

Jim Webb argues that we should stop measuring diversity by race alone.

Among the other lessons it teaches us, the Shirley Sherrod incident shows that the Obama Administration is seemingly becoming weaker by the day.

One of the more surprising elements of the Shirley Sherrod story was the swiftness with which the NAACP condemned Sherrod and supported her firing by the Department of Agriculture. By the end of the day on Tuesday, though, the organization was singing a much different tune: The president of the National Association for the Advancement [...]

Journalism and the New Media combined in a feeding frenzy yesterday and a woman lost her job. She probably shouldn’t have.

Rural whites are outperformed by Jews and Asians and passed over by blacks and Hispanics in the name of “diversity” by elite universities.

Think Progress incorporated clips of a Tea Party video of an impostor who pretended to be a member in order to discredit the movement as a racist into a video of their own to show that the movement is racist.

France’s Christophe Lemaitre became the first white man to run the 100 meters in under 10 seconds when he clocked 9.98 on Friday. Untold blacks have done it since 1968.

A white police officer has been convicted of involuntary manslaughter for killing a black man. Now, the Feds are considering leveling their own charges.

Former Black Panther Charles Barron, city councilman from Brooklyn, says only racists would ban vuvuzelas. Which he’d never heard of 30 seconds earlier. The mind boggles.

The post title is borrowed from Josh Marshall. Roll Call has a good article (sub.req.) today about the role of former President Bill Clinton in the 2010 election. The gist of the piece is that Clinton is turning out to be an important asset in this cycle since there are many parts of the country [...]

This may qualify as the dumbest example of political correctness in history: LOS ANGELES — A space-themed, talking Hallmark graduation card is being pulled from store shelves because of the card’s reference to a black hole. But members of the Los Angeles NAACP say the message sounds like “black whore” in the card’s audio recording. [...]

Naval Academy English prof Bruce Fleming has a scathing op-ed in the NYT titled “The Academies March Toward Mediocrity.” First, he argues that the very idea of the Academies is dated: [T]he Naval Academy, where I have been a professor for 23 years, has lost its way. The same is true of the other service [...]

Two more statements this morning from Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul that serve to clarify the kerfuffle that arose yesterday over his statements regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964. First, Paul was on Laura Ingraham’s radio show this morning and said that he considered the matter to be settled law: Kentucky Senate candidate [...]

Rand Paul, Kentucky’s newly minted Republican nominee for the Senate, is coming under some fire for his view that, while racial discrimination is abhorrent, he thinks private business owners ought be free to engage in it. Think Progress points to an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal.   Here’s the video: The transcript: INTERVIEWER: Would you have [...]

After reading a Guardian story is headined “A $95,000 question: why are whites five times richer than blacks in the US?” I still don’t know. A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts. White families [...]

The Phoenix Suns will be the “Los Suns” tonight, both in commemoration of Cinco de Mayo and in protest of Arizona’s controversial immigration law.  And, if they happen to make a ton of money selling jerseys, that’s a consequence they’re willing to live with. The Phoenix Suns will wear “Los Suns” on their jerseys in [...]

Regular reader and commenter Michael Reynolds forwarded me Arian Campo-Flores‘ Newsweek article entitled “Are Tea Partiers Racist?”   It contains provocative new data: Opponents have seized on these examples as proof that Tea Partiers are angry white folks who can’t abide having a black president. Supporters, on the other hand, claim that the hateful signs are [...]

Arizona’s ill conceived illegal alien crackdown, which is so obviously overbroad as to have drawn concern from Tom Tancredo, Marco Rubio, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and Joe Scarborough, has drawn one unlikely defender: George Will. It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal [...]

Apropos this, if you saw a vehicle with this on its windows, would you interpret it as “Heil Hitler? In related news, the Dallas Cowboys are going to have their 1st round pick, Dez Bryant, wear jersey number 88, following in the tradition of Michael Irvin and Drew Pearson.  Are they sending a secret, racist [...]

For whatever reason, my home state of Virginia leads the nation in vanity plates.    Heck, I’ve got one that says “OTB.”   But, apparently, the DMV frowns on tags that spout racist messages, even exceedingly cryptic ones. Brigid Schulte for WaPo: The owner of a Ford truck bearing the license plate 14CV88 will have to find [...]

Microsoft gazillionaire-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates has apparently decided to award Gates Millennium Scholarships only to Americans of  non-European descent.  He did so back in January but the word is just slowly getting around. Brian Garst observes, “Now, he is free to direct that his money be spent however he pleases.  The rest of us, likewise, are [...]

Tired of seeing the mass media harp on the hateful signs seen at some Tea Party rallies, John Hawkins has collected 22 “Protest Sign Reminders: What The Liberal Rallies From The Bush Years Were Like.” Sure, enough, there were plenty of signs equating America with Nazi Germany, calling for the murder of American politicians, and [...]

My governor has opened up an old wound, declaring April Confederate History Month. Anita Kumar and Rosalind S. Helderman seem to have broken the story for WaPo’s Virginia Politics Blog: Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark [...]

Charles Blow thinks so. It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists [...]

Some large number of Tea Party protesters assembled in the nation’s capital yesterday to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.  It appears that some smaller number of them acted abhorrently. HuffPo’s Sam Stein: A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a [...]

It seems that the NBC cafeteria honored black history month with a soul food menu featuring fried chicken, collard greens, corn bread, and black-eyed peas. So who at NBC thought it would be a good idea for the special today to be, among other things, fried chicken, “in honor of Black History Month”? Because, spoiler [...]

Dave Schuler passes along Ralph Peters‘ reaction to the Pentagon’s review of the Fort Hood shootings,  which both echoes my own immediate reaction and goes light years too far. Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It’s so inept, it doesn’t even [...]

The Pentagon has released its review of a shooting spree conducted by a radical Islamist Army major who gave every possible indication that he was a nut.  It admits the obvious: The military’s defenses against threats from inside its own ranks are outdated and ineffective, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Monday as he [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in trouble. Among the juicy revelations in the highly touted 2008 tell-all by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin is that Reid made some borderline racist comments about then-candidate and Senate colleague Barack Obama. He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace [...]

Brian Moore is working on a series of “Horrible Quotes” from beloved figures.  His first two: “There is an organized propaganda against the League of Nations and against the treaty proceeding from exactly the same sources that the organized propaganda proceeded from which threatened this country here and there with disloyalty, and I want to [...]

The New York Times‘ “Of Color” holiday gift guide, featuring is drawing some bemusement from all corners of the blogosphere.   But it’s a pretty good idea. The premise is both amusing and self-contradictory: Somali fashion, do-it-yourself henna kits, children’s books that draw inspiration from the lives of Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor: it’s not hard [...]

Perusing Yahoo! News last night, I came across a rather amusing AP story titled “Tiger’s troubles widen his distance from blacks.” Amid all the headlines generated by Tiger Woods’ troubles — the puzzling car accident, the suggestions of marital turmoil and multiple mistresses — little attention has been given to the race of the women [...]

Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley apparently enjoyed their beer summit with the president so much that they’ve decided to have another round.  Minus the president. In a setting a tad less formal, with no president or national press on hand, the Harvard professor and the Cambridge cop at the heart of last [...]

White elites, shockingly, seem to enjoy cities where the culture is dominated by white elites. Aaron Renn breaks the news. Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The [...]

Morehouse, the top historically black college for men, has issued a new dress code of which Bill Cosby will approve but gays groups do not. Since he was named as president of Morehouse College in 2007, Robert M. Franklin has stressed the importance of defining education broadly, well beyond courses. He has been talking about [...]

Joseph Ashby argues that something fishy is being ignored in the matter of Rush Limbaugh’s failed bid to buy the Rams. NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith served as counsel to Attorney General Eric Holder and was a member of Barack Obama’s transition team. [...] Despite the fact that Smith’s opposition was based on [...]

Missouri native Rush Limbaugh has been dropped from membership in a group seeking to buy the St. Louis Rams and keep them in the city.  This speeds up the inevitable conclusion fo the NFL’s owners refusing to let the controversial pundit join their ranks. Limbaugh was to be a limited partner in a group headed [...]

President Obama is losing support among white voters — including white Democrats — a new LAT poll finds. The voters losing faith in the president are the ones he had worked hardest to attract. New surveys show steep declines in Obama’s approval ratings among whites — including Democrats and independents — who were crucial elements [...]

Justin Barrett, a 36-year-old soon-to-be-former Boston cop and Massachussetts Army National Guard captain, is making the headlines with a letter he circulated describing, a bit too enthusiastically, his views on a Boston Globe column on the Henry Louis Gates incident. Alan Colmes has the background: His palpable anger appears to be directed at Globe columnist [...]

In last night’s press conference, President Obama weighed in on the disorderly conduct arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. “The police are doing what they should,” he said. “There’s a call. They go investigate. What happens? “My understanding is that Professor Gates then shows his I.D. to show that this is his house, and [...]

Robert Cox passes on the story of Demetrius Hazelton, the 17-year-old son a New Rochelle police detective, who is suing said PD after he was arrested after using a  “white racial monotone voice” which police claim is the same voice used by Dave Chappelle “when making fun of white people.” Bob supplies the following Chappelle [...]

Julian Sanchez argues that, while Sonia Sotomayor was given special consideration because she’s a Latina at various stages in her life, her case is “pretty close to the ideal of how affirmative action is supposed to work.” From a pool of highly qualified candidates, you let ethnicity act as a tiebreaker. It seems self-evident to [...]

I’m in rare agreement with John Hinderaker in finding Sonia Sotomayor’s explanation for her infamous “wise Latina” line less than plausible. I want to state up front, unequivocally and without doubt, I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judging. I do believe that every person has [...]

One wag on Twitter (okay, it was me) asked, “When #Sotomayor is confirmed, will others have to call themselves #wisegringos?” (The annoying hashtags are apparently de rigeur on Twitter as a means of differentiating the cognoscenti from the hoi polloi.) Thus far, the response has been positive.   For the sheer hell of it, I bought [...]

A rather thinly sourced piece in the Philadelphia News alleging racism at a private swim club is getting quite a bit of attention. More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason. “I heard this lady, she was like, [...]

President Obama told the AP that the Ricci case “moved the ball” on race relations. President Barack Obama said Thursday the Supreme Court was “moving the ball” on affirmative action in this week’s decision favoring white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., but he added that the court had not ruled out the use of racial [...]

By a slim 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the white New Haven firefighters whose promotions were denied because not enough non-whites passed the promotion exam.  Among those ruling the other way on the lower court was a certain wise Latina. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, [...]

While I think Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” line falls well short of racism and is even inarguably true given the right context (i.e., that personal experience colors one’s filtering of information) it’s still amusing to see it used against her in a clever fashion. Scott Ott weighs in with a satire piece entitled, “Sotomayor: Wise [...]

A Gallup poll released yesterday finds that, “More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are [...]