And a particularly trenchant bit of cowardice it is, given the closing paragraph.

Roots of Latino/black anger
By Tanya K. Hernandez
Tanya K. Hernandez is a professor of law at Rutgers University Law School.
January 7, 2007

THE ACRIMONIOUS relationship between Latinos and African Americans in Los Angeles is growing hard to ignore. Although last weekend's black-versus-Latino race riot at Chino state prison is unfortunately not an aberration, the Dec. 15 murder in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood of Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old African American, allegedly by members of a Latino gang, was shocking.

Yet there was nothing really new about it. Rather, the murder was a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods. Just last August, federal prosecutors convicted four Latino gang members of engaging in a six-year conspiracy to assault and murder African Americans in Highland Park. During the trial, prosecutors demonstrated that African American residents (with no gang ties at all) were being terrorized in an effort to force them out of a neighborhood now perceived as Latino.

Looks like they're wrapping up the Being a Black Man series at the Washington Post. We got an article posed like 9:30 last night, and four scheduled for Sunday...three of which are retrospectives.

Orlando is in the mix. He's kind of playing off the two non-retrospectives that sound kind of hopeful [P6: the previous word is subject to later editing], but all you really need to know about what he says is this:

Progress or Peril?
By Orlando Patterson
Sunday, January 7, 2007; B01

Personal responsibility, or victimization?

These two themes struck me as I read The Washington Post's "Being a Black Man" series.

Spare me. That's all that EVER strikes him. He walked through the door with his preconceptions.

Yeah, I got more. I might write it up, since I intend to get to the others. But he's not saying anything he hasn't always said.

Coca-Cola asked the Supreme Court to consider whether an employer may be held liable for intentional discrimination if the person who fired an employee harbored no discriminatory bias.

Race Discrimination Case Added to Docket
Associated Press
Saturday, January 6, 2007; A03

The Supreme Court yesterday added seven cases to its docket, including a discrimination case in which a Coca-Cola bottling company fired a black employee.

The lawsuit involves allegations that a supervisor of employee Stephen Peters was motivated by racial bias and influenced a human resources manager to fire the worker. Coca-Cola fired Peters for insubordination after he refused a request to work on a weekend during his scheduled days off.

via Steve Gilliard

A whiter shade of guile
In Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio is the latest in a long line of Caucasian crusaders fighting for po' black folks. Joe Queenan is once again staggered at Hollywood's sheer gall
Friday January 5, 2007
The Guardian

Zwick would thus have us believe that in a society ravaged by a murderous civil war, where black children are routinely kidnapped and induced to murder other black children, after being shot up with heroin purchased with conflict diamonds from horrible white people from out of town, the man who will ultimately bring the villains to justice is a formally depraved Rhodesian mercenary who now prefers justice and racial harmony to wealth. Hmmm, say I to Mr Zwick. Hmmm!

Yeah, yeah, I'm the Black partisan, but invisible Mexicans out to intentionally do something or other?

The groundwater has been contaminated with peyote juice. It's all I can think of to explain it. 

Johns Hopkins University students who organized two rallies in response to a racially themed Halloween party suffered a bitter backlash, confirming their fear that speaking out would only make their alienation worse.

I thought about this, because it WILL recur.

I suggest some long-term research. There should be a whole bag of articles ready for publication in August, about the psychological significance of masking, how masks let people give vent to buried beliefs and feelings. How dressing up as Mace Windu is different than dressing up as Stepin Fetchit for white folks...nevermind shit like this:

One widely forwarded Texas A&M video shows a white student painted with shoe polish getting whipped and sexually assaulted.

Focus on the Halloween dress-up, how the incidences are increasing. To hell with any suggestion that they are only becoming more visible...frankly, since everyone knows he truth, you're not looking for understanding. Your goal is the manipulation of perception.

Campus Racism Online
Tech gives a new look at a persistent problem
By Elizabeth Weiss Green
Posted Sunday, December 31, 2006

One Saturday night this fall, two college students went to a party. At 9:22 p.m. somebody took a picture. Eventually, everyone got tired and went to bed.

That would have been that–an ordinary Whitman College frat party in ordinary Walla Walla, Wash.–had Natalie Knott, a Whitman senior who wasn't invited to the party, not discovered the 9:22 p.m. photo two weeks later on the social networking website Facebook.com. In the photo, two Sigma Chi frat brothers, both white, are smiling ear to ear. They're also covered in thick black paint, evoking a minstrel show.

Orlando Patterson's Myopia, Part I
by Shavar Jeffries

Patterson declares that Black folk have overcome the institutional-power dimension of the race problem, but have failed to integrate into White cultural life because of continued residential segregation.  I want to focus here on Patterson's institutional-integration claim; I'll deal in another post with his residential-segregation claim.  Patterson raves that the United States is a “global model” for the “diversity of its elite [and] the participation of blacks and other minorities in its great corporations and its public cultural life.”...I fear that Professor Patterson may be suffering from a bout of myopia.  The very methodology by which he seeks to establish his premise reveals its vacuity.

It's not working like it used to.

Byron Williams
Black Culture has Taken a Wrong Turn

As I began to read my Christmas present to myself, a two volume set of "American Speeches," political oratory that spans from the Revolutionary War to Bill Clinton, I was reminded of a haunting, but chilling realization as I read a speech by Frederick Douglass: Black culture today, for all intents and purposes, is thug culture...

ONE Google hit disproves this bullshit...

This probably isn't the part of the article that makes their readers feel all warm inside. 

Segregation's mark is clear in his protective reserve. "He is guarded.... Emotionally you never throw that off," said Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.).

"I wasn't born this way," Mr. Clyburn says. "I taught myself to be as reserved as I am in order to survive."

Rep. Clyburn could not have said anything that I can relate to more. And you know that old saw about greatness being thrust upon you? It's true sometimes.

As a boy, Mr. Clyburn dreamed of being in politics, despite warnings from older blacks to keep his ambitions in check. The civil-rights movement thrust him forward in college, when he was arrested several times for demonstrations. In an early case, the late Rev. I. DeQuincey Newman, a mentor and South Carolina civil-rights activist, picked him to take the stand at the trial after Mr. Clyburn and other black students were arrested during an Orangeburg, S.C., demonstration.

It was common then for Southern newspapers to print the names of black student protesters on the front page, inviting retaliation against their families. Rev. Newman argued that in a white society the Clyburn family was safe from economic retribution: "Your daddy is a minister and he ain't preaching to no white people. Your mother is a beautician and she's fixing no white folks' hair. You're independent of the system. Nobody gets fired. So you're it."

Clyburn Leads Southern Blacks' Ascent To Top Posts in Congress
By DAVID ROGERS
January 3, 2007; Page A5

WASHINGTON -- In this time of change in Congress, Rep. James Clyburn, a minister's son from South Carolina, takes his place tomorrow as the House Majority Whip -- the No. 3 Democratic post and highest ever held by an African-American from a Southern district.

The 66-year-old Mr. Clyburn, who was 25 before the Voting Rights Act was enacted, symbolizes the rise of a set of Southern black lawmakers, shaped by the region and with a distinctive approach to politics separate from that of black leaders representing urban Northern districts.

The Unapologetic Mexican:

Race is not an oreo cookie that you can flip over and around and still have it equal the very same product in the end, just with an inverted shape. I do not mean to impugn the writer to which I link, I do not know them well, I am not addressing their entire body of work or even the thrust of the actual post on their page. I am aware of this. I am only using a statement of theirs to illustrate a reflex, a shape of thinking that is common, yet invalid—if one wants to arrive at truth and understanding that is.

Por ejemplo: If a White man lingers in a store aisle he will often do so without any harassment. If a Black man or a Latino hovers over items in a store, you will probably see a security agent soon show up or an agent of the store in some way harass him. You cannot flip these.

...get a serious answer.

The question is

At a time when the mainstream media was incapable of raising any alarm against Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two men whose demonstrable hostility to Affirmative Action and equal opportunity threaten to destroy the flimsy fabric of racial reconciliation and reverse the gains of the last 50 years, why is Barack Obama necessary to heal the wounds and absolve the sins of a deeply racist and imperialist nation like America?

If you listed to the Senator's speeches you will see a common theme. He runs sequetially through the various sufferage movements the nation has endured as though each came to a clean, elegant closure. He tells mainstream folks the serious problems are over and it's all a matter of incremental adjustments.

Links everywhere to everything that contributed to the psychic gestalt that generated the post, in the order I read them (which is why tabbed browsing is now de rigeur).

Sad Freaks of the Nation - Whiskey Fire

So even as the snivelling plagiarist we're dissecting sneers at the "MSM" for (subjunctively) dismissing Red Dawn as "cheesy" ephemera, he concedes that they would have a point in doing so.

It's all very confused. But it's worth stepping back and recognizing that these are structural ambivalences, necessary consequences of the way the movement conservative identity is being constructed. The imperative here is not to make an argument, or to even make sense. It is to validate the distinct group identity of "conservatives."

The Black American Problem

When I brought this up earlier I was attacked and it was claimed that the issue just doesn't exist. And yet, here it is again.

"I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there," she says. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school."

There's a problem with the black American culture in America, and I'm going to continue to talk about them, no matter how much people want to close their ears and cover their eyes.

THIS, Oliver, is acting white.

There's a lot more at play than just wanting or not wanting to be around white folks. But there's always been a lot of projection in Black Conservative-speak. 

Because neighborhoods are racially segregated, African Americans' homes do not grow in value as fast as whites' homes do. Shapiro calculates that housing segregation costs African Americans tens of thousands of dollars in home equity. Homebuyers look for amenities commonly found in predominantly white neighborhoods. They pay extra for parks, convenient shopping and attractive views. Parents pay huge premiums for what they perceive to be good schools. Few parents can judge schools objectively. Instead, they use easy-to-observe markers, including the race of the students. These preferences raise the costs that first-time homebuyers face when they attempt to buy houses in those mostly white neighborhoods. Economic theory implies that if whites continue to waste money on irrational prejudices like this, market forces will eventually undo the racial disparity in wealth. But the experience of the last 50 years suggests otherwise. Inequality has grown because each new generation has been willing to pay a higher premium for these amenities. The market doesn't punish discrimination; it rewards it.

Whites fail to see any injustice in these differences. Shapiro's interviews convinced him that whites hide their privilege from themselves and, accordingly, feel no guilt for the hidden costs they impose on African Americans. People who inherited tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars nonetheless told Shapiro that they were self-made and self-reliant. They proudly told him how the assets they inherited grew under their stewardship. White parents use wealth to send their children to private schools or to give their adult children down payments for homes. They do not see how such practices hand today's inequalities on to the next generation.

Shapiro argues convincingly that these private matters spill over into public investment, too. He interviewed one upper-middle-class woman who told him that she was unconcerned with troubles in the local public school because she never intended to send her children there. Shapiro points out that her indifference -- and that of others like her -- is just one more obstacle in the path of people trying to improve local public education.

The Hidden Cost of Being African American
Reviewed by Michael Hout
From The Washington Post's Book World

African Americans often seem cut off from the economic mainstream. They face higher risks of poverty, joblessness and incarceration than their fellow citizens do. Community organizing, civil rights legislation, landmark court decisions and rising education have advanced the cause of racial equality. Overt bigotry has been banished from public places, and polls show that whites harbor fewer prejudices than they used to. But these improvements have not been enough.

How can disadvantage persist so long after most laws, minds and practices have changed? Thomas M. Shapiro argues in this sober and authoritative book that we should look to disparities of wealth for the answer. Whites are wealthier than African Americans, and whites' wealth advantage is much bigger than their advantages in either income or education (the point of Shapiro's earlier study, Black Wealth/White Wealth, co-authored with Melvin Oliver). Whites start out ahead because they inherit more from their parents, and America's racially segregated housing markets boost whites' home equities, while depressing those of African-American families. Shapiro, a professor of sociology at Brandeis, takes readers through the implications of these inequities and concludes that African Americans will not gain significant ground in the wealth divide until inheritance and housing policies change.

Seems someone was fishing for support for Orlando at Brad DeLong's joint.

The excellent Jon Hilsenrath and Rafael Gerena-Morales have an article http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116727318376761110-email.html about the Clinton-era "Moving to Opportunity" pilot program. And, coincidentally, a correspondent asks me this evening if it is indeed the case that high relative poverty among African-Americans today is principally due to residential segregation, and whether residential segregation is in turn principally due to African-Americans' preference to live near other African-Americans.

Ignore that WSJ link...here's one that works.

In On having the courage of one's convictions, I wrote

Following referrals and such, I noticed something about the reaction to Orlando Patterson's latest effort. Everyone, with only three exceptions I can find, ducked. And I'm one of the exceptions.

Well, it's happened again with his accusation that Black people are to blame for segregation. There's not much out there on either; maybe because it all came during the height of Saternalia, maybe because the soup was too thin to feed on.

Cool looks instinctive, but growing up with three brothers and raising three sons taught me something surprising:

Cool is learned.

The Hard Core Of Cool
Confidence, Grace And Underneath It All, the Need to Be Recognized
Donna Britt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 30, 2006; C01

Years ago on a summer day, I was driving along the Detroit riverfront and saw a black man strolling down a wide downtown sidewalk.

Long, lithe and fluid as the river by his side, the man seemed to be gliding. Bareheaded, he wore a white, ankle-skimming djellaba from some sultry, equatorial nation. Yet something whispered that he was African American, something about his utter nonchalance as his garment whipped in the breeze and insinuated itself around his calves. Trust me:

He couldn't have been hotter -- or have seemed more chilled out.

Cool.

Over the years, I've seen plenty of striking men. But when someone mentions "cool," I hearken back to that strolling stranger. It wasn't his distinctive garb that burned his image into memory but his confidence. Flanked by skyscrapers and businessmen, he wore his exotic ensemble with such authority, the sweating corporate types around him seemed out of place.

Confidence is cool's most essential element. Perhaps that's why black men -- for whom the appearance of assurance can be a matter of life or death -- so often radiate it. Perhaps that's why in the United States, where men as different as Frank Sinatra, Joe Namath, Bruce Lee, Sean Connery, Benicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp have been deemed cool, black men remain cool's most imitated, consistent arbiters. I mean, there's cool -- and then there's brothercool.

Atkinson High might seem an unlikely laboratory for ethnic mixing. The school, which opened in 1955, barred blacks until 1970. In 1994, it was only 4 percent Hispanic, state statistics show, while now the population of 514 students is 50 percent white, 26 percent Hispanic and 22 percent black. Hispanic and black students wear their school colors, red and white, as proudly as their white classmates do.

Faculty members at Atkinson High, which is led by Paul Daniel, the principal, marvel at the changes.

“I’ve never taught at a school where Hispanics were on the football team or the cheerleading squad,” said Edwin Collins, a Spanish teacher.

“I have girls with Hispanic boyfriends and boys who wish they had Hispanic girlfriends,” said Mr. Collins, who has taught for nearly 20 years. “It’s different from anything I’ve ever seen.”

Hispanic Teenagers Join Southern Mainstream
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

PEARSON, Ga. — The buzzer blares and the students pour into the hallways — bubble gum snapping, locker doors slamming — as the young man of the moment saunters through the admiring crowd at Atkinson County High School.

He is thin and wiry with a whisper of a mustache and a taste for enormous Hollywood-style sunglasses. Like most popular boys, he receives flurries of party invitations and whispered confidences from pretty girls. Like other students, he juggles homework and dreams of becoming a singing sensation. In fact, in this tiny town, the most remarkable thing about him is his name, Frankie Ruiz.

In October, Frankie and a classmate, Kristen Galarza, made local history when they were named homecoming king and queen, the first time Hispanics won both titles in the same year. The coronation stirred astonishment, jubilation and some outrage in this Southern town, which is being transformed by Latino migration and is still struggling to adapt to its evolving ethnic identity.

Quietly, in the months since his mother's death, King has been building the nonprofit organization Realizing the Dream, which he said will provide conflict resolution, nonviolence and youth leadership training and help communities with economic development -- especially on thoroughfares around the country named after his father, many of which are in economically depressed areas.

With Nonprofit, Martin Luther King III Pursues a Separate Dream
By Errin Haines
Associated Press
Sunday, December 31, 2006; A17

ATLANTA -- Even as Coretta Scott King mourned the death of her husband, within days of his assassination, she set out to continue the work of Martin Luther King Jr.

I kid you not. It's another one of those TimesSelect pieces, titled The Last Race Problem, and all I can say is, the boy done sold all the way out.

So why does segregation persist? The evidence seems clear that, in sharp contrast with the past, the major cause is that blacks generally prefer to live in neighborhoods that are at least 40 percent black. Blacks mention ethnic pride and white hostility as their main reasons for not moving to white neighborhoods. But studies like Mary Pattillo-McCoy’s ethnography of middle-class black ghettos show that the disadvantages, especially for youth, far outweigh the psychic gains.

It would be naïve to discount persisting white racism, but other minorities, like Jews, have faced a similar dilemma and opted, with good reasons, for integration. The Jewish-American experience also shows that identity and integration are not incompatible, and that when the middle class moves, others follow. If America is ever to solve the second part of DuBois’s color problem, it will be on the shoulders of the black middle class.

Part two the excerpt from The Eisenhower Foundation's forum on poverty, inequality and race. The title of the post speaks for itself.

The Eisenhower Foundation had an excellent forum on poverty, inequality and race recently. I caught it on C-SPAN and was basically pleased.

The Foundation has the video online , parsed into nice, presenter-sized packets. I saw one in particular I thought it would be good to share; I thought it would be good to watch while holding both What Black Men Think (with the goddamn autoplay music on the goddamn MySpace page) and Orlando Patterson's latest in mind. I'm using my video because I think it's of better quality. First the documentation, then the explanation.

Texas: Panel Will Study Confederate Statues
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The president of the University of Texas at Austin, William Powers Jr., left, said he planned to form an advisory committee to study whether something should be done about the numerous campus statues honoring the Confederacy. The statues have become a topic of debate among students, professors and administrators. They include four bronze figures on the campus South Mall honoring Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Mr. Powers said he planned to appoint a committee of advisers early next year, probably including faculty members and students. “The whole range of options is on the table,” he said. “A lot of students, and especially minority students, have raised concerns. And those are understandable and legitimate concerns. On the other hand, the statues have been here for a long time, and that’s something we have to take into account as well.”

Following referrals and such, I noticed something about the reaction to Orlando Patterson's latest effort. Everyone, with only three exceptions I can find, ducked. And I'm one of the exceptions.

That op-ed fell into three parts. The first is an introduction that invoked the difference between authenticity and sincerity that listed putative problems he asserts are related when seen through that lens (though, it seems, at no other time). The second is an attack on Implicit Association Tests using the most strident, emotionally evocative language one can muster over a data gathering technique. The language Patterson used made it clear the problem is the conclusions points toward a personal component in racial bias that individuals can take responsibility for. The third section philosophically supports the "disparate impact" test for racism

Sincerity rests in reconciling our performance of tolerance with the people we become. And what it means for us today is that the best way of living in our diverse and contentiously free society is neither to obsess about the hidden depths of our prejudices nor to deny them, but to behave as if we had none.

...though that test has been specifically repudiated in court.

Finding part one to be empty and part three to be bullshit, my own response targeted part two. Anyone who read the thing can see the was the point of the op-ed. Every other response stopped as soon as the race issue was engaged. Everyone else talks about "authenticity vs sincerity" as though that were the point of the article. And so another encoded debate becomes current, and we find a new way to talk about things without saying a damn thing, another debate we can resolve without coming anywhere near the issues that raised the question.

Bah.

In a recent online conversation, a guy said to me

There is no one, simple, answer to all the things that plague blacks. But most white people are sure that racism is just one of them, and not the greatest of them.

If you, as a black person, cannot concede (stipulate to?) that, then there is actually nothing to discuss.

You can imagine after my response the gentleman decided there's nothing to discuss. And it's not like I was rude, either. I just recognize how humans work; anything you yield before entering a discussion you never get back. And there's one whole hell of a lot of...how did Prof. Patterson put it...tacit agreements in that statement. The next argument would be, “you should deal with your most important problems before you ask me to look at racism as a possible obstacle to you.”

I saw this headline

Nanny Hunt Can Be a ‘Slap in the Face’ for Blacks

...and thought, "yeah."  And it's not just immigrants with wrong ideas. Black folks, in general, do not like to serve Black folks.

"[TS] Our Overrated Inner Self" is quite a piece of work. I'm going to skip the first three paragraphs...it's all set-up, and reading it feels like playing hopscotch. I'll visit the first paragraph briefly toward the end mo my little screed.

Apologies to the jailbait; I don't know if y'all still play that game.

Anyway, the meat (such as it is) of the article

But it is in our attempts to come to grips with prejudice that authenticity most confounds. Social scientists and pollsters routinely belittle results showing growing tolerance;

Stop.

"Belittle" is a peculiar word for a sociologist to apply to data.

Covert, Michigan: A History in Black and White
by Jacki Lyden  

All Things Considered, December 24, 2006 · On the Midwestern frontier in the 1860s, the settlers of Covert, Mich., lived as peers, friends and sometimes even kin. What makes the story unusual is that they were both black and white.

The graveyard is eloquent testimony to their remarkable lives. There are hardscrabble pioneers and a lumberman whose tombstone has been cast from a tree trunk. The cemetery is one of very few in the country where black and white Civil War veterans lie together.

It's the sense of shared fate that attracted historian Anna-Lisa Cox to Covert. For more than a decade, she traced the tales of the town's pioneers. Earlier this year, she published a book on the subject.

Brown did not say that the mere use of race to assign students to schools was unconstitutional. As Roberts observed in his confirmation hearings, "the act of separating the students was where the violation was." The target of Brown's reasoning was not racial classification but the use of race to separate and thereby stigmatize and subordinate minority schoolchildren.

A unanimous 1971 decision by a Supreme Court composed of four Republican and five Democratic appointees confirmed that using race in student assignment was not itself the constitutional problem in Brown. School boards "might well conclude … that in order to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society, each school should have a prescribed ratio of Negro to white students reflecting the proportion for the district as a whole," Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote. "To do this as an educational policy is within the broad discretionary powers of school authorities."

If so, hit this link and subscribe to NPR: African-American Roundtable.

Roundtable: Victimization, Bush on Iraq and Politics

News & Notes, December 21, 2006 · Today's roundtable panel discusses victimization, President Bush's latest public remarks about Iraq, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) leadership of the House Ethics Committee and the Federal Election Commission's prediction that the 2008 presidential race could cost candidates $1 billion.