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  It admits the obvious: The military’s defenses against threats from inside its own ranks are outdated and ineffective, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Monday as he [...]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 [...]

Texas has modified its revolutionary “10 percent” program for higher education admissions after university administrators complained that they were “going to lose control over our class.” The “10 percent” plan in Texas has been one of the most successful experiments ever tried to get more minority students into top public universities with race-neutral criteria. It [...]

Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, asserts that, “given the opportunity, elite American universities are prone to implement discriminatory admissions policies that artificially limit the number of American students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent.“  Matt Yglesias is stunned and rightly appalled: “We’re a country that congratulates itself on having dismantled Jim Crow and [...]

The juxtaposition of George Will‘s latest column, “The Wreck of the Racial Spoils System,” and this odd appearance by Edward James Olmos and the cast of BSG at the United Nations (via Charli Carpenter) bitterly arguing that “there’s no such thing as race” except for, naturally, “the human race,” is startling.     Now, the [...]

One of the Supreme Court’s most anticipated decisions this term is likely to deal with the constitutionality of part of one of the landmark laws of the 20th century, the Voting Rights Act of 1965; this may be the most important of a series of cases the court will tackle this term considering civil rights. [...]

The Old Gray Lady has another of the epic scoops that made them the Newspaper of Record. Ace correspondent Helene Cooper breaks the news in a piece of journalism titled “For Young President, Flecks of Gray.” Well, that didn’t take long. Just 44 days into the job, and President Obama is going gray. It happens [...]

Via memeorandum, I see that the Washington Post issued a preemptive apology for this cartoon accompanying Gene Weingarten‘s humor piece, “Monkey Business – The good news for men: Women love apes” in the Sunday supplement: The apology: The headline, illustration and text of “Below the Beltway,” a column in The Washington Post Magazine today, may [...]

A group of voters in Alabama is suing to strike down Alabama’s 1901 constitution based on their claim that it was ratified fraudulently: The voters this month sued several state officials in Jefferson County Circuit Court’s Bessemer division, claiming they violated voter rights by failing to ensure that Alabama’s 108-year-old constitution is valid. State historians [...]

One of the trends I noted and commented on during the campaign was the insidious suggestion that one could only oppose Barack Obama’s election as president out of racism.   Now, it seems, we’re seeing the evolution of that theme:  racism must be behind any opposition to President Obama’s policy aims. Megan McArdle defends [here and [...]

The normally reticent Tiger Woods and the all-but-retired Garth Brooks will be featured in Barack Obama’s apparently-starting-early inauguration. Tiger Woods, who has tried to stay out of politics during his ascent to become one of the world’s most famous athletes, has accepted an invitation to speak at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday as part of [...]

Most of John McCain’s television spots, going back to the primaries, were simply dreadful. Now, Fred Davis III, the “advertising whiz” behind these atrocious ads, is whining to TIME’s Michael Scherer that McCain wouldn’t let him run some particularly clever ones. What if the McCain campaign had run ads using footage of Barack Obama dancing [...]

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that Bob Jones University’s current president has “apologized” for his institution’s racist policies, which persisted until the Civil Rights Movement finally made it to their little corner of Greenville, South Carolina in 2000. Per the university’s website: For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early [...]

One would think that a biracial president named “Barack Obama” who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia would feel a certain freedom from the need to demonstrate his bonafides on the diversity front. Not so much, it seems. Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee — once the chief economic adviser to candidate Barack Obama — may be [...]

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Ladin’s deputy, called Barack Obama a “house negro.” Al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader used a racial epithet to insult Barack Obama in a message posted Wednesday, describing the president-elect in demeaning terms that imply he does the bidding of whites. The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama [...]

Several folks are picking up on this Strange Maps overlay of cotton production in 1860 and the voting patterns in this month’s presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain: While the title “From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents” is rather amusing, it’s precisely wrong.  Indeed, the Strange Maps blogger makes this clear: The link between [...]

Larry Bartels examines the voting behavior of white Americans on Election Day and finds that, as he expected, we were very, very racist: According to the exit polls, Obama outpolled the previous Democratic nominee, John Kerry, among people from small towns and rural areas and among gun owners. He also did better than Kerry among [...]

My colleague Tom Traina has an interesting piece about a recent case in New York wherein a judge rejected actuarial tables because they make racial distinctions. Staten Island ferry passenger James McMillan was injured when the ferry crashed into a pier. When calculating damages, the state of New York presented actuarial evidence that suggested that [...]

Hall of Fame wide receiver Michael Irvin puts Barack Obama’s election into perspective: “What a historical moment that was last night. … From an African-American standpoint, I watched my people — watched my people — celebrate the not guilty verdict of O.J. Simpson. They were so hungry for a victory of some kind that they [...]

John McCain’s age hurt him far more than Barack Obama’s race, the exit polls show. Race played less of a role in the presidential election than age, exit polls showed Tuesday. Voters line up to cast their ballots in Henderson, Nevada, on Tuesday morning. While Barack Obama would be the nation’s first black president, John [...]

A new Pew poll shows a continuing decline for John McCain: Barack Obama leads John McCain by a 52% to 36% margin in Pew’s latest nationwide survey of 1,325 registered voters. This is the fourth consecutive survey that has found support for the Republican candidate edging down. In contrast, since early October weekly Pew surveys [...]

Two skinheads who were planning a national killing spree, culminating with a drive-by shooting of Barack Obama, have been arrested. In all, the two men whom officials describe as neo-Nazi skinheads planned to kill 88 people — 14 by beheading, according to documents unsealed in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn. The numbers 88 and [...]

At the risk of beating a dead horse of no specified color, one byproduct of this campaign will be to rob the word racism of what’s left of its power.  Lewis Diuguid, a Kansas City Star columnist of whom I’ve never previously heard, is getting significant blogospheric attention for a piece titled “Shame on McCain [...]

I’ve noted for months the rise of a meme, first in the Democratic primaries then, and especially, in the general election campaign that the only thing that could possibly keep Barack Obama from winning is racism.  Given that he appears to be coasting to victory, drawing in staggering levels of contributions and spending massive sums [...]

Matt Yglesias points to a new ABC/WaPo survey showing the racial breakdown in the presidential race: Among all white voters, McCain leads Obama by 7 points, 52-45 percent; that, however, is a bit less than the average Republican advantage among whites in presidential elections. Obama makes it back with 95 percent of blacks, as well [...]

Eugene Volokh points to a First Amendment Center survey (PDF) showing that 42 percent of Americans disagree with the proposition People should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to RELIGIOUS groups and 54% disagree that People should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to RACIAL [...]

A bizarre AP-YahooNews poll finds that racism could be the difference in the election. Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them “lazy,” “violent,” responsible for their [...]

A concern that I’ve expressed since the days of the primary campaign is that, because Barack Obama looks black, virtually any criticism lodged against him can be seen in racial terms.  (The same was true of gender in any attacks against Hillary Clinton.)   The latest example is the bold proclamation from TIME’s Karen Tumulty: “McCain [...]