I didn’t follow the news much this weekend, and what I caught was wall-to-wall Mel Gibson, so I missed the whole Romney “tar baby” comment and reaction. Dan Kennedy catches me up, fortunately. He’s measured in his judgment, giving Romney benefit of the doubt, but adding, “I don’t know whether Romney was speaking off the […]
Derek offers his thoughts on - and support for - Juneteenth. I agree that there’s a strong case that emancipation of American slaves was a key moment in the Republic’s development of its liberal ideals - as well as the playing out of the nation’s civil conflict - and thus deserves to be celebrated as a […]
No, it’s not an MLA paper topic. But Negrophile points to an interesting economics paper on same-race voting preferences in American Idol. Short version: the number of black viewers rises with the number of black contestants, and voting behavior tends toward same-race recognition, with black viewers more likely to vote for black candidates, non-black viewers […]
Jon Keller complains of “continuing parade of sickening left-wing racism toward Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.” He points to an episode which is in fact racist, but strikes me as the sort of isolated incident that gets picked up over the internets and circulated widely these days. But how widespread is the phenomenon? I don’t […]
In the current issue of Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, there’s an interesting interview with Keith Boykin (sorry, no online version), who argues that the "down low" - i.e. the lifestyle/identification of black men who sleep with other men but who are not gay-identifying - was all media hype and invention. I’m inclined to believe […]
Somehow no one combined the personal with the political more than the figure of Rosa Parks. The sheer importance of her courage and forthrightness in igniting the Civil Rights Movement and in fostering a new pride and consciousness of black America in the postwar years has been the talk of many tributes of the last […]
Source: Boston Globe
From back in 2003, when the consent decree ordering some affirmative action measure for the Boston Fire Department was lifted:
[I]n March, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed Stearns, finding that the fire department’s affirmative action policy requiring the hiring of one minority firefighter for every white one was […]
Wow, David Brooks goes lefty on us today. I fielded some disagreement before when I mentioned that there might be progressive, nonracist reasons for the concept of a black underclass. Certainly the rise of black middle-class and the existence of rural, largely white poor and the working poor immigrants challenge Great Society-era conceptions of racial […]
I’m not sure why the Globe touts the "First in a series of occasional articles about blacks and Latinos living in metro Boston." But the feature on one local African-American woman and her diagnosis of Boston’s racial barriers is quite good. More than the falsely quantitative study of the Harvard Civil Rights Project that caused […]
There’s been a big flap over Mexico President Vincente Fox’s comment that Mexican immigants were willing to take jobs “that not even blacks want to do in the United States.” Dimmy Karras mocks it as a stereotype of black Americans as lazy and unemployed. The Colorblind Society writes, “I’m not sure who he is denigrating […]
I’m a little shocked at the negative reactions to the results of the Civil Rights Project’s study of perceptions of discrimination in Boston. Some of our state’s white residents seem either angry that black residents perceive widespread racism and discrimination or else upset that those perceptions have been published. If you read their letters to […]
The Third Decade’s Derek takes me to task for writing about arcane tax policy while ignoring a recently released study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project on racial discrimination in Boston. Let me just say that a) I think there is a place for arcane policy matters in blogging and it’s something I enjoy writing […]
Slate summarizes today a fascinating study on the effect that racially-readable names have on social and economic life chances. The authors remind us once again that correlation does not equal causation and have the California data to prove it. It’s a useful companion to the study of black names in resume success, though in debunking […]
Negrophile points to an Indianapolis Star profile of a collector of black Americana. I’m not sure what Negrophile’s stance is (the weblog itself is primarily a news aggregator of sorts), but the news article does outline some of the positions on the worth of racist memorabilia (mammy jars, pickaninny dolls, etc.).
I have to say […]
There’s a tendency to make high-profile personel departures emblematic of broad seachanges. Just witness the Hegelian sweep of narratives about TV news anchors now that two are going. Sometimes this is a dicey proposition, but I don’t see how we can’t assign or at least look for greater significance by the concurrence today of two […]