This doesn’t really surprise me, because I read “Audacity of Hope.”  In the book it is very evident that Obama has made his Christian affiliation based on convenience and politics (he essentially says it).  It didn’t really disturb me too much, but I’ve made it evident before (can’t find the post–but I’m sure I did…really) that it wasn’t my favorite thing about him.

But to be a member of this Church goes a little beyond the pail.

As someone who has recently (admittedly cautiously–and so far unsuccessfully) confronted the racist tendencies of his own Church back home, it disturbs me that someone with as good of a chance to be President as Senator Obama would be a member of a Church with so much racist dogma that it would give Lewis Farrakhan an award for “Person of the Year.”

My good friend, Jimmy, constantly tells me:  Satan is a divider.  Anyone who not only visits, talks to, acknowledges, but is a member of such a divisive and racist congregation is going to have a hard time convincing me that he’s really a uniter.

You see, I’m beginning to think that Senator Obama thought that if he wrote this cool book, that people would just stop paying attention and trust him.  The problem I suppose is that the book made many START to pay attention to him.  And that hasn’t been good for him.

There’s only one question for me really:

If a high-profile Presidential Candidate belonged to or closely affiliated with a WHITE racialist Church, would we hear about in the press?

And the corollary: And what if they were a pro-choice, Universal Health Care-supporting, anti-war, Democrat that belonged to a WHITE racialist Church?

In other words:  Is Obama getting a free pass on this relationship because he’s a Democrat or because he’s Black?  Or both?

Jason Malloy at Gene Expression wrote a long and detailed post on James Watson’s recent statements on evolution in Africa vs. Europe. The opener:

It is long and detailed with a lot of facts. Here’s the opener:

The public intellectual forum is being manipulated with intimidation and coercion and you are being lied to. The media is not doing its job, and the scientific community is not playing its proper public role as a beacon of dispassionate truth seeking, as a conduit of knowledge to the public, or in fostering an open and fair intellectual climate. Both are abusing their power and authority to do the opposite of their honor bound social and intellectual roles; facts are being distorted in service of values.

Watson’s remarks in the interview, like Larry Summers before him, were fairly mild. Notheless, a lot of tsk-tsking from the editorialists at Nature.

Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education
By JUAN WILLIAMS Published: June 29, 2007 Washington

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.
With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.
Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.
And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.
…
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29williams.html

Every time I hear people say, “The illegals are doing jobs Americans aren’t willing to do!” I think of stories like this:

Many had been holding out hope that they would be home in New Orleans by now, but the city’s rebuilding has been painfully slow, and about 100,000 are still here. They have settled in more or less permanently, some still on food stamps.

About 12,000 families are still getting federal aid for housing, the city said. Of that group, about 5,500 heads of households are unemployed, not counting those who are elderly and disabled, city officials said.

Sadly, Katrina evacuees, citizens of the US of A, are treated with less respect than people who willfully (and sometimes repeatedly) broke American laws to enter the country, and have no plans of assimilating or even learning English. What does Al Sharpton or Hillary Clinton have to say about all this?

I remember my first summer selling books in Tishomingo, Mississippi. I worked in small towns like Belmont, Iuka, and Burnsville, and meeting and dealing with the general public at 18 years old. I remember the first day Paul “The Rock” Dupuy trained me, during which we met a respectable white family. The father very casually made an extremely racist remark during the sale. I thought it was strange because Belmont was a small town (~1000) with not a lot of blacks in it (<100). Although this attitude was prevalent throughout Tishomingo, one of the top policemen in Iuka was a black transplant from Memphis (quite frankly my favorite customer that summer). I thought that there is a difference between racist guff and racist policy. Tishomingo, MS was no Cullman, AL. I heard that first summer about the signs posted in Cullman, Alabama informing certain groups about where they should not be when the sun goes down.

For the most part states like LA, MS, AL, and SC,have a lot of racist guff and less racist policy. My second summer, in Estille and Jones counties in Kentucky, was a marked contrast. Race wasn’t an issue, but people complained about city folk from Richmond. I met 3 or 4 black people in two Kentucky counties (most blacks lived in Richmond, home of Eastern Kentucky University). I always wondered how and why the demographics broke down like that.

The racial purity in rural Kentucky was no accident. I found an excerpt from a recent book called Sundown towns which discusses the formation of white’s only towns like Cullman, AL and Corbin, KY. After being in Columbus, Ohio for nearly six years (ugh!) I found this passage not surprising.

Even though sundown towns were everywhere, almost no literature exists on
the topic.7No book has ever been written about the making of all-white towns
in America.8 Indeed, this story is so unknown as to deserve the term hidden.
Most Americans have no idea such towns or counties exist,or they think such
things happened mainly in the Deep South. Ironically, the traditional South
has almost no sundown towns. Mississippi, for instance, has no more than 6,
mostly mere hamlets, while Illinois has no fewer than 456…

Dr James Loewen, the author, goes on to note that Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Connecticut were far more exclusionary in practice than was Louisiana or Alabama. I think I could quibble with the author about his parameters, but in general he has presented a good case of systematic racism. In my opinion, this was the impetus that essentially forced blacks into urban populations where they have been forced into poor school districts and the learned helplessness of subsidized housing and welfare benefits.

Often media elites ascribe racism to confederate states (or Republican voters), but Dr. Loewen presents an eye-opening case of persistent Yankee racism.

In my neck of the woods nearly a hundred years ago, blacks could own property out in the country without fear, which doesn’t seem to be the case in Kentucky or Indiana. Also, Louisiana has a population of rural Jews, a rare occurrence in the US (perhaps the world!). There is a lot more to the story than David Duke.

Sundown Towns website

I really find this a little confusing for two main reasons:

1) I’ve listened to Imus many times before and have heard way more offensive, racist, and degrading comments–anti-semitic, misogynistic, etc.

2) This guy is not a conservative, and never has been. He supported Kerry for President, and constantly kisses the ass of media elite, liberal politicians, and “maverick” Republicans.

Why now? Why him? And “Who’s next?”

Update: Now he’s been fired from CBS Radio as well, BUT…you can now buy a variety of “nappy-headed hos” paraphernalia. America, what a country.

Imus Fired from MSNBC - Associated Content

I didn’t want to do this, but Scottie put me up to it. I couldn’t find any logical way to defend the systematic racism of David Duke. I invite the millions and millions of Logifans out there to attempt to do so for themselves by clicking the link above (you’ll have to search his name) and coming to their own conclusions. Perhaps if the Isreali ambassador simply held a contest to pay cartoonists to insult Asians or Arabs, as Ahmadinejad had done against Israelis, he would have been fine. There’s good diplomacy. Excuse me while I NOT self-flagellate.

Just came back from the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Atlanta, 24,000 scientists eager to provide a Keynesian infusion of capital into the travel and tourist industry. Seriously though, it is quite an educational affair.

One interesting anecdote. In downtown Atlanta, the hotel and service industry is African American, to a person. One thing’s for sure, they are American citizens and know English. I was genuinely surprised when I heard the maid say, “Housekeeping!” without an hispanic accent.

At the convention center I had breakfast with a Trinidaddian colleague who has stylish dreads and a carribean accent. We walked into the restaurant and the waitress sits him down at a table. I made like I was going to sit across from him, and the waitress said, “You sit over here” and directed me to a separate table. I hadn’t had coffee yet, so I complied, for about 30 seconds.
When it dawned on me how stupid I was I moved back. The waitress’ eyes got big and she was about to warn me. Pre-emptively, I told her, “No, I’m with him, it’s ok”.

We all laughed about it, but it illustrates the old reflex to segregate that persists throughout the south.

After a couple of weeks of seeing angry white Duke girls pouting and publicly displaying the white members of the lacrosse team all over the Duke campus, and all the race mongering about Duke University, it turns out there is no physical evidence that they held her against her will or raped her. The boys probably shouldn’t have hired an “exotic dancer”, but does that warrant suspension of the lacrosse season? Hey, maybe it does, but Ohio State has students who were on football scholarships get convicted of armed robbery and other felonies, and no games were canceled.

Posted at 10:52 pm by Johnny B

Life in France is not better than America, exhibit 798. Click the link for the video from the NYTimes.

Posted at 10:18 pm by Johnny B