Forty two years after his assassination, Martin Luther King’s dream(s) has not been fully realized. Dr. King would have turned 81 last Friday, had he not met an untimely death, courtesy of assassin James Earl Ray.

Despite solid civil rights strides over the last few decades, marching towards Dr. King’s dream, a section of Republican America is still as fucked up as they were in 1900s. Although systematically dwindling in numbers, it is unfortunate to note that quite a fairly large chunk of “conservative savages” are still roaming this land, spitting venom like trapped cobra’s.

So, where’s the racial progress Obama promised? Polls suggest that one year into the Obama presidency, the country hasn’t made much progress when it comes to views on race.

I concur ….too may tea-bagging goons still living in America.

As I have stated above, as long as race-baiting baboons in the mode of Palin, Beck, Limbaugh ….Fox News, similar Republican Scum, and despicable black apologists like Michael Steele still exist, race relations in America will remain strained for a long time to come.

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President Obama Celebrates MLK Day

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Race Discussion: Town Hall at Texas Southern University

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Panel Discussion: Town Hall at Texas Southern University

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The State of Race Relations in America

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Embracing Obama’s Vision of Change

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Debating Affirmative Action

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Houston’s Mayor on Acceptance in America

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Race, Immigration, Generations

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Relieving Racial Tension Through Humor

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More Questions From The Audience

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Closing Thoughts

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MSNBC’s Ed Schultz is joined by Prof. Michael Eric Dyson

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   [ By: Melissa Harris-Lacewell ]
Joe Biden once remarked that Barack Obama was “clean” and “articulate.” He is now Vice President. During the Democratic primaries Hillary Clinton invoked Robert Kennedy in a way that implied Barack Obama’s assassination was imminent. She is now the Secretary of State. It is foolish to suggest Senator Harry Reid should step down as Senate majority leader because of his 2008 assessment that Barack Obama’s election was more likely because he is “light-skinned” and free from “Negro dialect.”

If President Obama has demonstrated anything at all, it is that he unperturbed by the racially awkward outbursts of his fellow Democrats.

Republicans hope that reports of Reid’s old gaffe might derail his leadership of the health care reform package. But watching Michael Steele go after Reid is more bizarre than convincing. Steele seems to pride himself on the liberal use of black discursive patterns. It’s hard to take seriously the moral outrage of a self-professed “hip-hop Republican” who explains his tenure as GOP chairman saying “brother still here.”

President Obama may be unconcerned and the GOP may be transparently race baiting, but Reid’s comments did create a legitimate queasiness among many Americans that is worth exploring.

President Obama is a forgiving, beer summit kind of leader, but I am less likely to give Democrats a free pass on issues of racial bias. As I wrote a few months ago here on The Notion, any implication that racism is the sole purview of the Right obscures the continuing and troubling realities of racism within the Democratic Party and progressive political movements.

Still, I remain entirely uninterested in a racial McCarthyism that plays “gotcha politics” with elected officials public utterances. Yes, public officials should be particularly careful when talking about race to media (on or off the record). The opportunities for misunderstanding, divisiveness and assumption of ill intent are heightened in this area of political discussion.

But let’s be honest, if we weeded out every public official guilty of racial insensitivity, the halls of Congress would echo with utter emptiness. The point is not so much public gaffes as it is the creation, support, and maintenance of systemic and structural inequalities. This is why Trent Lott’s wistfulness about a Strom Thurmond presidency is in a different class than Reid’s comments. Lott was longing for a bygone era when structural barriers and entrenched inequality were the norm. Reid was enthusiastic that the same barriers were lessening and that America was ready, albeit with caveats, for a new racial reality.

Rather than being worked up about Reid’s awkward assessment of these barriers, we should be asking whether these structural biases actually make academic and political accomplishments easier for light-skinned African Americans. NC State University historian Blair LM Kelley makes this argument in her piece on Salon.com. She points out skin color bias in the 21st century should alarm us. It shouldn’t be a matter of breezy acceptance, as many Sunday morning pundits seemed to suggest. “Accepting this as a matter of course degrades the quality of our democracy.”

Reid’s assertions about “Negro dialect” also should raise structural justice questions far more important than his offensive use of an antiquated term for black Americans. Because of generations of lower class status and legal barriers to quality education, black children are far more likely than their white counterparts to be raised by parents with inadequate literacy skills. But rather than acting as a leveling ground, many public schools only reinforce these disadvantages. These are the same children relegated to schools with fewer expert teachers, larger classroom sizes, fewer educational resources, and fewer literacy support tools.

This is the racism that should worry us: millions of black American children attend and graduate from public schools that leave them utterly unqualified for public office for their entire lives. As adults these children will always be second-class citizens, unable to participate as rule makers rather than simply rule followers in their own country. Not only does this deprive whole group from full participation in government, it also deprives our country of the skills, talents, and ideas that these citizens might have offered, had we not initially deprived them of the capacity to communicate their ideas effectively in the public realm.

Political theorist Nancy Fraser’s describes imagines justice as “a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price for equal respect.” Creating that world is an important task for combating racism.

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   [By: Eugene Robinson]
Skin color among African Americans is not to be discussed in polite company, so Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s newly disclosed remark about President Obama — that voters are more comfortable with him because he’s light-skinned — offended decorum. But it was surely true.

Color bias has always existed in this country. We don’t talk about it because we think of color as subordinate to racial identification. There are African Americans with skin so light-hued that only contextual clues speak to the question of race. I remember once looking up some distant cousins on my father’s side. They were so fair of hair and ruddy of cheek that I thought I’d gone to the wrong house, until one of them greeted me in what I guess Reid would call “Negro dialect.”

Forgive me if I am neither shocked nor outraged. A few years ago I wrote a book about color and race called “Coal to Cream,” and the issue no longer has third-rail status for me. What I would find stunning is evidence that Reid’s assessment — made during the 2008 campaign and reported in a new book by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin — was anything but accurate.

Advertising is a reliable window into the American psyche, so look at the images we’re presented on television and in glossy magazines. The black models tend to be caramel-skinned or lighter, with hair that’s not really kinky — which is how I’d describe mine — but wavy, even flowing. A few models whose skin is chocolate-hued or darker have reached superstar status, such as Alek Wek and Tyson Beckford, but they are rare exceptions.

Skin color could hardly be a more conspicuous attribute, but we don’t talk about it in this country. That’s been a good thing.

I became interested in perceptions of color and race when I was The Post’s correspondent in South America. On reporting trips to Brazil, a country with a history of slavery much like ours, I kept running across people with skin as dark as mine, or a bit darker, who didn’t consider themselves “black.” I learned that at the time — roughly 20 years ago — fewer than 10 percent of Brazilians self-identified as black. Yet at least half the population, I estimated, would have been considered black in the United States.

This was because American society enforced the “one-drop” rule: If you had any African blood at all, you were black. In Brazil, by contrast, you could be mulatto, you could be light-skinned, you could be “Moorish” brown, all the way to “blue-black” — more than a dozen informal classifications in all. Color superseded racial identification. In Salvador da Bahia, I met a couple who considered themselves black but whose children were lighter-skinned. The children’s birth certificates classified them as branco, or white.

The Brazilian system minimized racial friction on an interpersonal level. The American system fostered such friction, through formal and informal codes that enforced racial segregation. But our “one-drop” paradigm also created great racial solidarity among African Americans, while maximizing our numbers. We fought, marched, sat in, struggled and eventually made tremendous strides toward equality. The most recent, of course, was Obama’s election, which is difficult to imagine happening in Brazil — or, for that matter, in any other country where there is a large, historically oppressed minority group.

Brazil has now begun addressing long-standing racial disparities through affirmative action initiatives. But the upper reaches of that society — the financial district in Sao Paulo, say, or the government ministries in Brasilia — are still so exclusively white that they look like bits and pieces of Portugal that somehow ended up on the wrong side of the ocean.

American society’s focus on race instead of color explains why what Harry Reid said was so rude. But I don’t think it can be a coincidence that so many pioneers — Edward Brooke, the first black senator since Reconstruction; Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice; Colin Powell, the first black secretary of state — have been lighter-skinned. Reid’s analysis was probably good sociology, even if it was bad politics.

Much worse, as far as I’m concerned, was the quote the new book “Game Change” attributes to Bill Clinton. In an attempt to persuade Ted Kennedy not to support Obama, Clinton is supposed to have said that “a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

I guess the one-drop rule can still trump Harvard Law.

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[Enlarge] About The Author: Eugene Robinson — is an Associate Editor and twice-weekly columnist for The Washington Post. His column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. In a 25-year career at The Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper?s award-winning Style section. In 2005, he started writing a column for the Op-Ed page. He is the author of “Coal to Cream: A Black Man?s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race” (1999) and “Last Dance in Havana” (2004). Robinson is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and has received numerous journalism awards. More Articles By Mr. Robinson: | Part 1 | Part 2 |

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   By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
Tom Horne to Ethnic Studies: Drop Dead!

TUCSON — Arizona is the New South and the new South Africa. It is the home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, where racial profiling is official policy. Now, in another form of profiling, State Superintendent of Schools Tom Horne wants to eliminate ethnic studies.

At his behest and by a 4-3 Senate panel vote, an amendment to education bill S.B. 1069 was passed that emphasizes the teaching of individualism at the expense of ethnic studies. The bill would permit the department of education to withhold 10 percent of state monies if ethnic studies continue to exist. The full legislature is expected to pass it within several weeks, and Republican Gov. Jan Brewer is expected to sign it into law.

Horne has spent two-and-a-half years pushing this bill, and it will effectively send Arizona school children into the dark ages. Overriding the concept of local control, Horne wants Arizona teachers to impose one view of America upon the state’s children.

His objective, according a press release from his office, is “to prohibit ethnic studies in Arizona public schools.” But his real objective appears to be ensuring that only the nation’s sacrosanct national narrative is taught in schools.

This narrative is presumably the nation’s greatest asset. It is a compilation of foundational myths and legends that defines the United States as the New Promised Land — a nation chosen by God to essentially create heaven on earth. Its secular version is to militarily spread freedom, democracy and capitalism to the rest of the world.

Horne joins the likes of Newt Gingrich, Tom Tancredo, Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs and all their talk-show brethren, in both promoting scapegoat politics and in corrupting the English language.

In Horne’s America, genocide, slavery, land theft, segregation, discrimination, extralegal brutality and racial supremacy are taught as footnotes at best, or disappeared altogether. In his America, exclusion is inclusion and ignorance is bliss. In attempting to impose his philosophy, he fancies himself as carrying on the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. He oxymoronically accuses ethnic studies educators of promoting racism and separatism.

The legislation targets ethnic studies, but exempts “classes or courses for Native American pupils that are required to comply with federal law.” Also exempted are classes for English learners. Horne’s actual target is Raza Studies at Tucson Unified School district. In his crusade, he accuses Raza Studies of promoting “ethnic chauvinism” and of being a “dysfunctional program.”

Nicollete Gomez, who was in both Native American and Raza Studies at Tucson High School, says, “The outsiders who say that we are ‘unAmerican’ and ‘dysfunctional’ obviously do not sit in these classes to experience intellectual students ready for college material.”

Horne is seemingly unaware that students from Raza Studies, who are taught about their indigenous cultures, consistently outperform students from all backgrounds at TUSD. They also have a very high college-going rate. Research by Dr. Augustine Romero, former director of Raza Studies, confirms this phenomenal success.

Facts are of no concern to Horne. Only the nation’s foundational myths/legends are important. This includes, as he told the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation in 2007, the Greco-Roman roots of western civilization.

Lecia J. Brooks, director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center and Teaching Tolerance at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s premier center for tracking hate crime, says, “The teaching of so-called ‘individualism’ is but another example of Western European cultural dominance. This is madness. Educators everywhere should declare in one voice: ‘Culturally relevant pedagogy actually improves instruction for all students?that is, if they’re allowed access to it.’”

Horne isn’t promoting sound educational policy which encourages critical thinking; he’s selling hyper-U.S. nationalism or nationalized mind control.

As University of Arizona first-year student Pricila Rodriguez, a Raza Studies alum from Tucson High, also reminds us, “People that insist that taxpayer money should not be used for ethnic studies forget that we are taxpayers, too.”

In protest, supporters in Tucson of ethnic studies will stage a two-day march to Phoenix on June 28 and 29. It’s about 90 miles through desert heat. But it’s one way to put the heat on Tom Horne.

This video exposes the relationship between Joe Arpaio and Neo-Nazis

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•    Rodriguez can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com or PO BOX 85476 – Tucson, AZ 85754

•    Tom Horne to Ethnic Studies: Drop Dead!

•    NEW AMERICA MEDIA COLUMNS — http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/

•    ARCHIVED COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS — http://web.mac.com/columnoftheamericas/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html

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   By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
The president’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has come during a most awkward time in the history of U.S. journalism, which many analysts claim is in serious decline, if not on life support.

What her nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less. Yet, to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include FOX News and virtually all the known right-wing radio talk show hosts, is the antithesis of journalism.

Their coverage of the Sotomayor nomination points to the need for honest debate, not simply on the issues of race, but on the right wing’s aversion to truth. It also points to the right wing’s pompous beliefs, on every topic, including affirmative action, that their positions are “American.”

Extremist politicos Newt Gingrich and Tom Tancredo, both of whom have zero credibility but are stars of right-wing media, have led the charge that Sotomayor is a racist. They have been joined by the usual wingnuts: Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, to name a few. Even Juan Williams of NPR, has parroted the claim that Sotomayor’s (out-of-context) statements are racist. The fact that the nation’s discussion centers on whether she is a racist or not — or that she is an “affirmative action” pick (Buchanan) — points to both the power of the wingnuts and also to the virtual impotence, or complicity, of mainstream media.

Historically, mainstream journalists have been taught that critical analysis constitutes injecting subjectivity into their reporting.

All this brouhaha is based on the Sotomayor statement that the experiences of a Latina might allow her to make better judgment in court than a white male. Her detractors say that if a white male had made similar statements he would have been automatically disqualified.

They conveniently ignore the fact that the Supreme Court has been virtually all-white for most of the nation’s history. It also ignores the fact that throughout U.S. history, white males have generally not been subjected to apartheid discrimination and segregation, let alone extermination, slavery, forced removals, extra-legal brutality and false imprisonment.

The charges against Sotomayor have a familiar ring. Staunch segregationists used to charge that Martin Luther King, Jr. was both un-American and a racist. President Ronald Reagan institutionalized that kind of thinking in defense of South Africa’s apartheid regime. For him, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, while the outlaw South African regime constituted a “democratic ally.”

Such thinking was also “normalized” during the affirmative action debate; those who attempted to dismantle the vestiges of racial discrimination were deemed “racists” or “reverse racists,” or communists by those working to maintain it (A reverse racist is precisely what Limbaugh labeled both Sotomayor and President Obama).

Those doing this labeling have well understood the nation’s changing political climate; they could no longer campaign as the defenders of white racial supremacy. Instead, they generally cloaked their views under the conservative-Republican mantle and wrapped themselves in the American flag.

They also knew that to win a debate required further subverting the nation’s political language. These same “patriots” began to reinterpret MLK Jr.’s quote about the dream of a color-blind society.

In public, they gladly accepted the “dream” without accepting the societal responsibility of dismantling and remedying centuries of institutional racism and discrimination in this country.

While the majority of Americans can see through the false arguments and the “clever” subversion of the political language by these so-called patriots, this does not hold true for the mainstream media.

As we are seeing with Sotomayor, all it takes is a handful of “extremists” to control and shape the media debate.

Perhaps the only upside is that Americans can now clearly see that the politics of Gingrich and Tancredo are the same as that of Limbaugh, Liddy, Beck, Buchanan and Dobbs. These pundits who daily rant against “illegal aliens,” and who daily clamor on the need to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, are quoted as credible sources by the mainstream press. They are generally the same ones who promote the politics of fear and hate, who believe in the use of torture, and who also believe that the United States is endowed with the God-given right to conduct permanent war against the rest of the world.

Truthfully, who can discern a difference between these right-wing fanatics and the positions of mainline conservatives within the Republican Party?

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•    Rodriguez can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com or PO BOX 85476 – Tucson, AZ 85754

•    NEW AMERICA MEDIA COLUMNS — http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/

•    ARCHIVED COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS — http://web.mac.com/columnoftheamericas/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html
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