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Paying the Price - New York Times

Paying the Price - New York Times

April 12, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Paying the Price

By BOB HERBERT

You knew something was up early in the day. As soon as I told executives at MSNBC that I was going to write about the “60 Minutes” piece, which was already in pretty wide circulation, they began acting very weird. We’ll get back to you, they said.

In a “60 Minutes” interview with Don Imus broadcast in July 1998, Mike Wallace said of the “Imus in the Morning” program, “It’s dirty and sometimes racist.”

Mr. Imus then said: “Give me an example. Give me one example of one racist incident.” To which Mr. Wallace replied, “You told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car, coming home, that Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes.”

Mr. Imus said, “Well, I’ve nev — I never use that word.”

Mr. Wallace then turned to Mr. Anderson, his producer. “Tom,” he said.

“I’m right here,” said Mr. Anderson.

Mr. Imus then said to Mr. Anderson, “Did I use that word?”

Mr. Anderson said, “I recall you using that word.”

“Oh, O.K.,” said Mr. Imus. “Well, then I used that word. But I mean — of course, that was an off-the-record conversation. But ——”

“The hell it was,” said Mr. Wallace.

The transcript was pure poison. A source very close to Don Imus told me last night, “They did not want to wait for your piece to come out.”

For MSNBC, Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was bad enough. Putting the word “nigger” into the so-called I-man’s mouth was beyond the pale.

The roof was caving in on Mr. Imus. More advertisers were pulling the plug. And Bruce Gordon, a member of the CBS Corp. board of directors and former head of the N.A.A.C.P., said publicly that Mr. Imus should be fired.

But some of the most telling and persuasive criticism came from an unlikely source — internally at the network that televised Mr. Imus’s program. Women, especially, were angry and upset. Powerful statements were made during in-house meetings by women at NBC and MSNBC — about how black women are devalued in this country, how they are demeaned by white men and black men.

White and black women spoke emotionally about the way black women are frequently trashed in the popular culture, especially in music, and about the way news outlets give far more attention to stories about white women in trouble.

Phil Griffin, a senior vice president at NBC News who oversaw the Imus show for MSNBC, told me yesterday, “It touched a huge nerve.”

Whether or not Mr. McGuirk was hired for the specific noxious purpose referred to in the “60 Minutes” interview, he has pretty much lived up to that job description. He’s a minstrel, a white man who has gleefully led the Imus pack into some of the most disgusting, degrading attempts at racial (not to mention sexist) humor that it’s possible to imagine.

Blacks were jigaboos, Sambos and Brilloheads. Women were bitches and, above all else, an endless variety of ever-ready sexual vessels, born to be degraded.

The question now is how long the “Imus in the Morning” radio show will last. Just last month, in a reference to a speech by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Selma, Ala., Mr. McGuirk called Mrs. Clinton a bitch and predicted she would “have cornrows and gold teeth” by the time her presidential primary campaign against Senator Barack Obama is over.

Way back in 1994, a friend of mine, the late Lars-Erik Nelson, a terrific reporter and columnist at The Daily News and Newsday, mentioned an Imus segment that offered a “satirical” rap song that gave advice to President Clinton on what to do about Paula Jones: “Pimp-slap the ho.” Mr. Nelson also wrote that there was a song on the program dealing with Hillary Clinton’s menstrual cycle.

So this hateful garbage has been going on for a long, long time. There was nothing new about the tone or the intent of Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment. As Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, told me the other night, “It’s a long pattern of behavior, and at some point somebody has to say enough is enough.”

The crucial issue goes well beyond Don Imus’s pathetically infantile behavior. The real question is whether this controversy is loud enough to shock Americans at long last into the realization of just how profoundly racist and sexist the culture is.

It appears that on this issue the general public, and the women at Mr. Imus’s former network, are far ahead of the establishment figures, the politicians and the media biggies, who were always so anxious to appear on the show and to defend Mr. Imus.

That is a very good sign.

Legendary Grambling coach Eddie Robinson dies | ajc.com

Legendary Grambling coach Eddie Robinson dies | ajc.com

Legendary Grambling coach Eddie Robinson dies

The Associated Press
Published on: 04/04/07

RUSTON, La. — Eddie Robinson, who sent more than 200 players to the NFL and won 408 games during a 57-year career, has died.

He was 88.

Super Bowl MVP quarterback Doug Williams, one of Robinson's former players, said the former Grambling State University coach died about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Robinson had been admitted to Lincoln General Hospital on Tuesday afternoon.

Robinson had been suffering from Alzheimer's, which was diagnosed shortly after he was forced to retire following the 1997 season, in which he won only three games. His health had been declining for years, and he had been in and out of a nursing home during the last year.

In his 57 years in football, Robinson set the standard for victories with a 408-165-15 record. John Gagliardi of St. John's, Minn., passed Robinson in 2003 and has 443 wins.

Robinson's teams had only eight losing seasons and won 17 Southwestern Athletic Conference titles and nine national black college championships.

He sent more than 200 players to the NFL, including seven first-round draft choices.

It was a career that spanned 11 presidents, several wars and the civil-rights movement. His den was packed with trophies, representing virtually every award a coach can win. He was inducted into every hall of fame for which he was eligible.

Indentured Servants in America - New York Times

Indentured Servants in America - New York Times

March 12, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Indentured Servants in America

By BOB HERBERT

A must-read for anyone who favors an expansion of guest worker programs in the U.S. is a stunning new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that details the widespread abuse of highly vulnerable, poverty-stricken workers in programs that already exist.

The report is titled “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States.” It will be formally released today at a press conference in Washington.

Workers recruited from Mexico, South America, Asia and elsewhere to work in American hotels and in such labor-intensive industries as forestry, seafood processing and construction are often ruthlessly exploited.

They are routinely cheated out of their wages, which are low to begin with. They are bound like indentured servants to the middlemen and employers who arrange their work tours in the U.S. And they are virtual hostages of the American companies that employ them.

The law does not allow these “guests” to change jobs while they’re here. If a particular employer is unscrupulous, as is very often the case, the worker has little or no recourse.

One of the guest workers profiled in the report was a psychology student recruited in the Dominican Republic to work at a hotel in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The woman had taken on $4,000 in debt to cover “fees” and other expenses that were required for her to get a desk job that paid $6 an hour.

But after a month, her hours were steadily reduced until she was working only 15 or 20 hours a week. That left her with barely enough money to survive, and with no way of paying off her crushing debt.

The woman and her fellow guest workers had hardly enough money for food. “We would just buy Chinese food because it was the cheapest,” she said. “We would buy one plate a day and share it between two or three people.” She told the authors of the report: “I felt like an animal without claws — defenseless. It is the same as slavery.”

Steven Greenhouse of The Times recently reported on a waiter from Indonesia who took on $6,000 in debt to become a guest worker. He arrived in North Carolina expecting to do farm work but found that there was no job for him at all.

The report focused primarily on the 120,000 foreign workers who are allowed into the U.S. each year to work on farms or at other low-skilled jobs. In most cases the guest workers take on a heavy debt load to participate in the program, anywhere from $500 to more than $10,000. Worried about the welfare of their families back home, and with the huge debt hanging over their heads, the workers are most often docile, even in the face of the most egregious treatment.

The result, said the report, is that they are “systematically exploited and abused.”

Some of the worst abuses occur in the forestry industry. The report said, “Virtually every forestry company that the Southern Poverty Law Center has encountered provides workers with pay stubs showing that they have worked substantially fewer hours than they actually worked.”

A favorite (and extremely cruel) tactic of employers is the seizure of guest workers’ identity documents, such as passports and Social Security cards. That leaves the workers incredibly vulnerable.

“Numerous employers have refused to return these documents even when the worker simply wanted to return to his home country,” the report said. “The Southern Poverty Law Center also has encountered numerous incidents where employers destroyed passports or visas in order to convert workers into undocumented status.”

Without their papers the workers live in abject fear of encountering the authorities, who will treat them as illegals. They are completely at the mercy of the employers.

President Bush has been relentless in his push to greatly expand guest worker programs as part of his effort to revise the nation’s immigration laws. To expand these programs without looking closely at the gruesome abuses already taking place would be both tragic and ridiculous.

“This is not a situation where there are just a few bad-apple employers,” said Mary Bauer, director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has initiated a number of lawsuits on behalf of abused workers. “Our experience is that it’s the very structure of the program that lends itself to abuse.”

N.Y. Times- An Unjust Expulsion

March 8, 2007

Editorial

An Unjust Expulsion

The Cherokee Nation’s decision to revoke the tribal citizenship of about 2,800 descendants of slaves once owned by the tribe is a moral low point in modern Cherokee history and places the tribe in violation of a 140-year-old federal treaty and several court decisions. The federal government must now step in to protect the rights of the freedmen, who could lose their tribal identities as well as access to medical, housing and other tribal benefits.

This bitter dispute dates to the treaties of 1866, when the Cherokee, Seminole and Creek agreed to admit their former slaves as tribal members in return for recognition as sovereign nations. The tribes fought black membership from the start — even though many of the former slaves were products of mixed black and Indian marriages.

The federal courts repeatedly upheld the treaties. But the federal government fanned the flames when a government commission set out in the 1890s to create an authoritative roll of tribal membership. Instead of placing everyone on a single roll, it made two lists. The so-called blood list contained nonblack Cherokees, listed with their percentage of Indian ancestry. The freedmen’s list included the names of any black members, even those with significant Cherokee ancestry.

The issue exploded in the 1980s when tribal authorities excluded the freedmen from voting on the grounds that they weren’t Cherokee by blood. The Cherokee version of the Supreme Court ruled last year that the law was unconstitutional. The expulsion vote was a response to that ruling and to a pending federal lawsuit by the freedmen, which charges both the tribe and the federal government with violating the treaty and the Constitution.

Advocates for the expulsion say it is about self-determination. But the tribal history makes clear that it is about discrimination — and that it is illegal. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has been curiously silent, should bring the Cherokee government into compliance with the law and require it to restore the tribal rights of the expelled members.

Education, Education, Education-Op-Ed Columnist N.Y. Times

March 5, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist N.Y. Times

Education, Education, Education

By BOB HERBERT

It’s an article of faith that the key to success in real estate is location, location, location.

For young black boys looking ahead to a difficult walk in life, the mantra should be education, education, education.

We’ve watched for decades — watched in horror, actually — as the lives of so many young blacks, men and boys especially, have been consumed by drugs, crime, poverty, ignorance, racial prejudice, misguided social pressures, and so on.

At the same time, millions of blacks have thrived, building strong families and successful careers at rates previously unseen. By far, the most important difference between these two very large groups has been educational attainment.

If anything, the role that education plays in the life prospects of black Americans is even more dramatic than in the population as a whole. It’s the closest thing to a magic potion for black people that I can think of. For boys and men, it is very often the antidote to prison or an early grave.

A new report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston tells us that young adults in general have been struggling in the labor market. Many have been left behind by the modest economic recovery of the past few years, especially those with limited education credentials.

The report, which focuses on black males, emphasizes the importance of education in overcoming this tough employment environment:

“For males in each of the three race-ethnic groups (blacks, Hispanics and whites), employment rates in 2005 increased steadily and strongly with their educational attainment. This was especially true for black males, for whom employment rates rose from a low of 33 percent among high school dropouts to 57 percent among high school graduates, and to a high of 86 percent among four-year college graduates.

“The fact that only one of every three young black male high school dropouts was able to obtain any type of job during an average month in 2005 should be viewed as particularly distressing, since many of these young men will end up being involved in criminal activities during their late teens and early 20s and then bear the severe economic consequences for convictions and incarcerations over the remainder of their working lives.”

There is no way, in my opinion, for blacks to focus too much or too obsessively on education. It’s the fuel that powers not just the race for success but the quest for a happy life. It represents the flip side of failure.

The differences in rates of employment between white men and black men narrow considerably as black men gain additional schooling. After comparing the percentage of the male population that is employed in each race or ethnic group, the Northeastern study found:

“The gap in [employment to population] ratios between young white and black males narrows from 20 percentage points among high school dropouts, to 16 percentage points among high school graduates, to eight percentage points among those men completing 1-3 years of college, and to only two percentage points for four-year college graduates.”

For anyone deluded enough to question whether education is the ticket to a better life for black boys and men, consider that a black male who drops out of high school is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than one with a bachelor’s degree.

Black males who graduate from a four-year college will make, over the course of a lifetime, more than twice the mean earnings of a black high school graduate, which is a difference of more than a million dollars.

According to the study, “Black males with college degrees and strong literacy/math skills also are far more likely to marry and live with their children and pay substantially more in taxes to state and national government than they receive in cash and in-kind benefits.”

This is not a close-call issue. It is becoming very hard for anyone to succeed in this society without a college education. To leave school without even a high school education, as so many males — and especially black males — are doing, is extremely self-destructive.

The effort to bolster the educational background of black men has to begin very early. It’s extremely difficult to turn a high school dropout into a college graduate. This effort can succeed on a large scale only if there is a cultural change in the black community — a powerful change that acknowledges as the 21st century unfolds that there is no more important life tool for black children than education, education, education.

Libby and Cheney Won’t Testify, Says the Defense

February 14, 2007

Libby and Cheney Won’t Testify, Says the Defense

By NEIL A. LEWIS and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — Lawyers defending I. Lewis Libby Jr. against perjury charges surprised the courtroom on Tuesday by saying that they would rest their case this week and do so without putting on the stand either Mr. Libby or Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Libby was Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff.

The decision means that Mr. Libby’s defense, which will formally end on Wednesday, will have spanned barely three days. Mr. Libby’s chief defense lawyer, Theodore V. Wells Jr., told Judge Reggie B. Walton that Mr. Libby had accepted the defense team’s recommendation to end their presentation swiftly and send the case to the jury by next week.

The decision could be viewed as a sign that Mr. Libby’s lawyers are confident that the prosecution failed to make its case.

Mr. Wells had earlier signaled strongly that he intended to call Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney to testify, which suggests that the defense team recently analyzed the costs and benefits of putting them on the stand and concluded that their testimony would not, on balance, help Mr. Libby.

One likely factor in that calculation is that putting Mr. Libby on the stand would expose him to a cross-examination by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the chief prosecutor, that could be withering. Mr. Fitzgerald complained that the defense had engaged in a “bait and switch” tactic by keeping Mr. Libby off the stand after repeatedly suggesting that he would testify.

Mr. Cheney’s testimony, which was much anticipated, would have set a precedent as the first appearance of a sitting vice president as a witness at a criminal trial. It was also expected to bolster a major part of Mr. Libby’s defense: that he was so consumed by the crush of high-stakes issues like global terrorism and Iraq that he might not have remembered all the details of his conversations.

But the trial threw up numerous instances in which Mr. Cheney took a personal role in managing the White House response to accusations from Joseph C. Wilson IV, a prominent critic of the Iraq war, that the evidence for going to war had been knowingly overstated. Mr. Cheney could have been exposed during cross-examination to uncomfortable questions about his close involvement in trying to undermine Mr. Wilson’s criticisms.

Mr. Wilson also said the identity of his wife as a Central Intelligence Agency operative was purposely leaked to the press in retaliation for his criticism. Mr. Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury and to F.B.I. agents investigating that leak.

The jury is expected to hear final arguments from both sides beginning next Tuesday.

Although the jury will not hear Mr. Libby in person, during the trial, prosecutors played eight hours of audiotapes in which Mr. Fitzgerald questioned him before the grand jury. The jury heard Mr. Libby giving his version calmly in the first two-thirds of the tapes and then seeming to become uneasy and less confident as Mr. Fitzgerald bore in.

Prosecutors have said Mr. Libby learned of the identity of Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Wilson, from fellow administration officials in the summer of 2003 and discussed her with reporters. Mr. Libby swore that he had not discussed Ms. Wilson with reporters and believed that he had learned about her in a conversation on July 10 or 11 with Tim Russert of NBC News.

Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, formerly of Time magazine, testified for the prosecution that Mr. Libby had discussed Ms. Wilson with them. Mr. Russert testified that he never discussed Ms. Wilson with Mr. Libby.

The defense has argued that the three reporters have remembered their conversations incorrectly. And, if Mr. Libby testified incorrectly, it was because his memory was faulty because of the press of official business.

Mr. Libby’s lawyers were able to glean what would have been some of the benefits of Mr. Cheney’s testimony through another witness on Tuesday.

The witness, John Hannah, a former deputy to Mr. Libby who is now a national security adviser to Mr. Cheney, took the jurors on a tour of Mr. Libby’s concerns in the summer of 2003, including the Iraq war, Islamic extremists’ threat of a biological attack, Iranian and North Korean nuclear capabilities and diplomatic crises with Liberia and Turkey.

In Mr. Hannah’s account, Mr. Libby had barely time to draw an extra breath, starting with an early morning C. I. A. briefing “that covers the waterfront of the world.”

Mr. Hannah also provided testimony for another defense argument when he said Mr. Libby had a notoriously bad memory. “On certain things, Scooter just had an awful memory,” he said, using Mr. Libby’s nickname.

He said that on occasion Mr. Libby would tell him some idea in the afternoon, having forgotten that he, Mr. Hannah, had given him the idea in the morning. Mr. Libby, sitting at the defense table, laughed. Mr. Hannah said in response to a question from a juror — an unusual procedure used by Judge Walton — that Mr. Libby had a good memory for ideas and concepts.

Although Mr. Hannah testified for the defense for nearly two hours, the prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald, seemed to cut down much of the significance of his testimony in five minutes of cross-examination. Noting that Mr. Hannah had testified that he could usually have a few minutes alone with Mr. Libby only in the evening after the crush of business, Mr. Fitzgerald suggested that Mr. Libby would have devoted time only to matters of great concern to him in the week of July 6, 2003.

“If he gave something an hour or two that week, it would be something Mr. Libby thought was important, right?” asked Mr. Fitzgerald.

“Well, with regard to me, yes,” Mr. Hannah replied.

Left unsaid in the exchange was undisputed testimony that Mr. Libby spent nearly two hours on Tuesday, July 8, with Ms. Miller, then a Times reporter. Ms. Miller has testified that Mr. Libby told her in detail about Ms. Wilson at the meeting. Mr. Libby acknowledged meeting Ms. Miller to counter Mr. Wilson’s accusations, but said he did not discuss Ms. Wilson.

Underlying Mr. Hannah’s testimony was a fierce legal battle between the defense team and prosecutors over how much the jury should be told of Mr. Libby’s busy schedule now that he is not going to testify. One of his lawyers, John Cline, said, “We want to show he was caught in a tornado of information.”

Judge Walton ruled that without Mr. Libby’s live testimony he would not allow Mr. Wells to argue in his closing that the issue of Ms. Wilson was far less important than the national security issues on his agenda.

“I’ve said that relative importance is not going to be an issue on the table if Mr. Libby doesn’t testify,” he said.

Jill Abramson, managing editor of The New York Times, testified earlier on Tuesday that she could not remember a conversation with Ms. Miller after the July 8 meeting with Mr. Libby. Ms. Miller had testified earlier in the trial that she had suggested to Ms. Abramson that day that The Times assign someone to look into the role of the Wilsons.

Ms. Abramson, who was on the witness stand for less than five minutes, said, “It’s possible I occasionally tuned her out,” but said she had no recollection of the conversation.

February 2, 2007

So Far, Obama Can’t Take Black Vote for Granted

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — He is hailed by his supporters as the hope of an increasingly multicultural nation, a political phenomenon who can wow white voters while carrying the aspirations of African-Americans all the way to the White House.

So why are some black voters so uneasy about Senator Barack Obama?

The black author and essayist Debra J. Dickerson recently declared that “Obama isn’t black” in an American racial context. Some polls suggest that Mr. Obama trails one of his rivals for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the battle for African-American support.

And at the Shepherd Park Barber Shop here, where the hair clippers hummed and the television blared, Calvin Lanier summed up the simmering ambivalence. Mr. Lanier pointed to Mr. Obama’s heritage — he is the American-born son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — and the fact that he did not embody the experiences of most African-Americans whose ancestors endured slavery, segregation and the bitter struggle for civil rights.

“When you think of a president, you think of an American,” said Mr. Lanier, a 58-year-old barber who is still considering whether to support Mr. Obama. “We’ve been taught that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn’t feel right to some people.”

On Wednesday, the question of race took center stage in the presidential campaign because of remarks that Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, made about Mr. Obama. Mr. Biden characterized Mr. Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” and then spent the day — his first as an official presidential candidate, explaining and apologizing for his remarks.

But among many blacks, the awkward and painful debate about race, immigrant heritage and the presidency has been bubbling for months.

Mr. Obama certainly has prominent black supporters and many shake their heads with exasperation at such talk about a man they see as the first African-American with a real shot at the presidency.

His supporters say his background only enhances his appeal as someone who has addressed the concerns of black Americans as a community organizer in Chicago, a state legislator in Illinois and a senator in Washington.

“He has a track record for being concerned about people who are poor, and it seems to be genuine,” said Carol M. Swain, a black professor of political science at Vanderbilt University who has written about black politics. “Not only do I think that black Americans will embrace Barack Obama, but I think they will do it with enthusiasm.”

Indeed, many pollsters and analysts believe Mr. Obama’s life story of growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia with his mother and his maternal grandparents and of his struggle to define his own racial identity will resonate with voters across ethnic and color lines.

But while many whites embrace Mr. Obama’s melting pot background, it remains profoundly unsettling for some blacks who argue that he is distant from the struggles and cultural identities of most black Americans. The black columnist Stanley Crouch has said, “When black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,’ I do not know what they are talking about.”

Ms. Dickerson echoed that sentiment.

“I’ve got nothing but love for the brother, but we don’t have anything in common,” said Ms. Dickerson, who wrote recently about Mr. Obama in Salon, the online magazine. “His father was African. His mother was a white woman. He grew up with white grandparents.

“Now, I’m willing to adopt him,” Ms. Dickerson continued. “He married black. He acts black. But there’s a lot of distance between black Africans and African-Americans.”

Mr. Obama’s strategists are keenly aware of the gap and are trying to address it. On Martin Luther King’s Birthday, he spoke at a scholarship breakfast alongside the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Mr. Jackson introduced him by saying, a “new president is in the house.”

Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, who is an African-American, were also on the February cover of Ebony.

Mr. Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, both former black presidential candidates, have declined to formally endorse Mr. Obama so far.

But Julian Bond, the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has described him as “tremendously appealing.” Several black Democrats in Congress, including Representatives John Lewis, the civil rights pioneer from Georgia; Jesse L. Jackson Jr. of Illinois, the son of Jesse Jackson, and Artur Davis of Alabama, have supported his presidential bid.

His supporters, who note that he carried the black vote in his Senate race, say they are unperturbed by a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that found that 20 percent of black voters surveyed supported Mr. Obama while 60 percent supported Mrs. Clinton. The survey had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus nine percentage points.

Emil Jones Jr., the president of the Illinois state senate and one of Mr. Obama’s early mentors, says he is frustrated by black voters who question Mr. Obama’s Kenyan heritage. As a state legislator, Mr. Obama had the support of voters in his district, which is 67 percent black.

“He doesn’t share the same kind of background as most African-Americans, but he’s addressed those issues that related to underprivileged communities throughout Illinois,” said Mr. Jones, who is black.

Mr. Obama describes himself as an African-American, and as a young man, he has said, he yearned to be accepted by black Americans.

Mr. Obama declined to be interviewed, but in his memoir, published in 1995, he acknowledged being dogged by “the constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn’t, I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.”

Still, Mr. Biden’s remarks this week only heightened concerns among some blacks who believe that Mr. Obama, as the son of a black Kenyan, is more politically palatable to white voters because he is viewed as less confrontational and less focused on redress for past racial injustices than many black Americans descended from slaves. In that context, he resembles the last black man deemed to be a powerful presidential contender, Colin L. Powell, who flirted with a White House bid in 1995.

Discussing his appeal to white voters at the time, Mr. Powell, the light-skinned son of Jamaican parents, noted that he spoke English well and was not confrontational. He concluded by saying, “I ain’t that black.”

Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist at the City University Graduate Center, said such a description might as easily apply to Mr. Obama. “He’s identifiably black, but in many ways he’s outside of normal race relations,” said Mr. Kasinitz, who has studied black immigrants in New York City politics. “He’s a black politician for whom whites don’t have to feel guilty.”

Ronald Walters, who advised Mr. Jackson’s presidential campaigns, said Mr. Obama’s campaign “evokes something which is very much in vogue, this notion of diversity that is not rooted in a compensatory concept.”

“He’s going to have to win over some African-Americans,” said Mr. Walters, who is black and heads the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. “They have a right to be somewhat suspicious of people who come into the country and don’t share their experience.”

In the 1990s, the number of blacks with recent roots in sub-Saharan Africa nearly tripled while the number of blacks with origins in the Caribbean grew by more than 60 percent, according to the State University of New York at Albany. By 2000, foreign-born blacks constituted 30 percent of the blacks in New York City and 28 percent of the blacks in Boston, according to demographers at Queens College.

Several leaders of the civil rights era had immigrant roots, including Stokely Carmichael, who was born in Trinidad; and Shirley Chisholm, the former presidential candidate and the first black woman to be elected to Congress. Her father was born in Guyana and her mother in Barbados.

Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign, said she believed that Mr. Obama could woo black voters.

“Barack will tell us that we don’t have to go back to being just a white America or a black America, that we can now become something else, together,” said Ms. Brazile, who is unaffiliated with any presidential candidate.

“That’s the promise of his campaign,” she said, “and his challenge.”

Sabrina Pacifici contributed research for this article.

Herman Badillo is a hero for our time

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com Badillo is taking naysayers to school

Monday, January 29th, 2007

Herman Badillo is a hero for our time.

Badillo, born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, has impeccable credentials - he's been a congressman, a borough president, a deputy mayor of New York and chairman of the board of the City University of New York. He has not only been around the block, he has been in the neighborhoods and has thought long and hard about the various obstacles to those minorities presently given to accepting low levels of performance as "normal" or "cultural." He knows enough about human beings to recognize that once their value system includes and celebrates high academic achievement, most of the problems disappear.

One of the things that has held minorities back is that many have lost sight of the value of the high standards that provide success in this country.

The result was that too many people have begun to see actual shortcomings as "cultural" styles that have to be defended against racism. Not being able to read, for instance, or not being able to speak English are not "cultural choices"; they are examples of an impermanent condition that can be cured by instruction.

Badillo, in his new book, "One Nation, One Standard," shows he is well aware of the fact that minority students from the Middle East and Asia don't rebel against high standards of academic performance; they go about mastering them, which is the only explanation when it is obvious that the same level of performance is seen in black and Latino students who do the same thing.

At one point, there was even a discussion in America of "black English," as though it was a cultural choice and not a lack of mastering the language.

Arguments about cultural relativity did not serve black and Latino students well, nor did so many special programs that did not live up to the ultimate job, which is educating children so well that they can make career choices rather than have to settle for what little their skills can do for them in the workplace.

The liberals who secretly did not believe that black and Latino students were capable of rising to the challenge chose to remove as many challenges as possible in the interest of "fairness," while the world of work moved along as it always had, not hiring them. It was never recognized that being trapped in the world of the poor because one is barely educated is a lot harder on the individual than putting in long hours of study when necessary.

Badillo recognizes the problems and rightly believes that Latinos and the nation at large will benefit from the imposition of high standards and the removal of the lower standards that express more condescension than any kind of actual regard for student potential.

In a period when public education is so slippery with snake oil, it is inspiring to read the words of someone who is not afraid to stand up to a self-serving and incompetent vision that sabotages black and Latino students.

Badillo knows that an inferior education is the equivalent of offering a pat on the back with hands that have razor blades between the fingers.

The little cuts are disguised by the backslapping but, in the long run, the wounds will result in one career corpse after another. Herman Badillo is trying to shed a light on the situation. He is a hero for our time.

From Susan Pizarro-Eckert,
Your Guide to Race Relations.
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How Should We Interpret Biden's Comments About Obama?

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” This quote comes from Senator Joe Biden, who recently announced he too was throwing his hat into the already crowded ring for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Since he made this statement, blogs have been buzzing. And key media personalities have requested that the Senator and Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee clarify what he meant. (watch his response on YouTube.)

This scenario reminds me of that Geico commercial, the one in which the caveman sits across from the therapist who asks him why the company slogan "So easy a caveman can do it" is so offensive to him. Rather than answer the question, the caveman responds with a question of his own: "How would you feel if it said 'So easy a therapist can do it?' To this, the therapist cocks her head and confidently responds, "Well that wouldn't make sense." "Why," asks the caveman, "because therapists are smart?" In the Geico slogan "so easy a caveman can do it" the offensive subtext is obviously "...and as you know, cavemen aren't smart."

It seems to me that Biden's comment plays on the prevailing stereotypes about African-American males: that they are unintelligent, inarticulate, dirty/corrupt/criminal, and unattractive. The subtext of his comment becomes "...and you know those people are unintelligent, inarticulate, dirty/corrupt/criminal, unattractive." If we understand this, then we understand the context for his next comment, which is "It's a storybook, man."

When it comes to race, and comments about race, people are either so quick to defend, or attack, that we end up blind to what lies before our very eyes. But, what if we took Biden's comment out of a racial context? What if we pretended just for one moment that he had instead said, "I mean, you got the first mainstream woman who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking gal?” How would this comment have come across then? My guess would be major controversy about whether or not Senator Joe Biden is a chauvinist woman-hater and therefore, whether or not he is fit for the presidential role.

But Biden was referring to Obama's race. That's not my opinion; here's a direct quote: "...you got the first mainstream African-American..."

And because he targeted race in such a derisive manner (Are we really to believe that never before Obama has there been an "articulate," "bright," "clean," and "nice-looking" African-American in the mainstream eye?), I believe he invited the resulting controversy.

Still, some bloggers have written that they see no harm in his comments, explaining either that this says more about "Biden's tendency to run his mouth off, I think, than it is some indication of latent racism (written by Greg Tinti on The Political Pit Bull)," or, enlightening us all by clarifying that what the Senator really meant to say can only be understood if you add the context words he left out: specifically “presidential candidate....And I presume by “clean” he means “clean-cut” rather than “bathes regularly.” (written by James Joyner on Outside the Beltway)."

And still other bloggers, while acknowledging the arrogance and ignorance of Biden's comments, are taking this opportunity to slam Democrats for making a faux pas on a subject they usually attack Republicans for: "Maybe Biden has been hanging around Robert Byrd for a little too long...Anyway, it’s nice to see the Democrats come out and show you what they really think of minorities in this country. They always bring up race as an issue, and now you know why (See "And the Left Say WE'RE Racists?")."

But let's not forget: Biden is no stranger to controversy. He was a candidate for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, but according to USA Today, withdrew from the race in 1987 amid accusations that he had plagiarized passages in his speeches. In addition, his earlier comments about not being able to go into a 7-eleven or Dunkin Donuts without an Indian Accent (CBS News) also managed to ruffle more than a few feathers.

What's your opinion? Were Biden's comments about Obama appropriate?...Participate in our forum poll.

Is Obama the new 'black'? - Los Angeles Times

Is Obama the new 'black'? - Los Angeles Times:

Gregory Rodriguez:

Is Obama the new 'black'?

The possible presidential candidacy of the biracial senator has sparked an illuminating debate on race.

December 17, 2006

WE KNOW this: Barack Obama is a rising star. He's a powerful speaker and a gifted writer. He is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. But is he black?

That's what New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch asked last month, and his answer was decidedly "no." No, Crouch wasn't just employing the old "blacker than thou" canard. Nor was he concerned with the fact that Obama was raised by his white mother. Rather, he was treating blackness not just as a racial (shared biology) identity but as an ethnic (shared historical experience) one. And isn't that what the switch of terms from "black" to "African American" was all about?

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Think back to the late 1980s, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson became the most prominent black to call for the adoption of the term African American. "Just as we were called colored, but were not that," he said, "and then Negro, but not that, to be called black is just as baseless…. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of maturity." The problem, of course, is that most black Americans are descendants of slaves who had their African cultural heritage brutally stripped from them.

What Crouch is arguing is that what the majority of black Americans share is their ancestors' experience as human chattel, brought to these shores in the grips of chains. Slavery and segregation not only forged a rigid racial line between black and white but created a shared ethnic experience. For Crouch, the fact that Obama's father — whom Obama met only once — was a black Kenyan who came to the U.S. to study at Harvard and the University of Hawaii removes him from the traditional black American narrative.

Author and essayist Debra Dickerson agrees. She believes that much of Obama's popularity among whites stems from the fact that his family wasn't part of the slave experience and therefore elicits no feelings of historical guilt. "The swooning from white people is a paroxysm of self-congratulation," she said. But Dickerson also thinks that Obama's thoughtful embrace of his African lineage has the potential to broaden the definition of what it means to be black in the United States. Indeed, the possibility of an Obama campaign for the presidency has already sparked an unusual — and potentially illuminating — debate about race.

It's true that in our country, blackness is not a choice but rather something thrust on people who have any hint of African lineage. Traditionally, anyone with "one drop of African blood" has been considered black. But in recent decades, more children of black-white unions are choosing to buck the "one-drop rule" and call themselves biracial.

But in this respect, Obama is a traditionalist. He clearly chooses a black identity, but he does so even as he embraces his Midwestern Anglo roots. In other words, rather than straddling two identities or creating a new mixed one, he prefers to place himself within a single category and then expand it. In his lyrical yet interminable 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama tells of his journey toward accepting his absent father's legacy and coming to terms with his feelings of alienation from both sides of his family tree. Ultimately rejecting old-fashioned racial nationalism and narrow notions of authenticity, Obama encourages Americans to accept their messy racial inheritance. And though he admits that his personal story bears little resemblance to that of most African American families, he chose to graft his own personal story onto theirs.

The one-drop rule was developed to protect slavery and to maintain segregation. By defining all mixed children as black and compelling them to live in black communities, the rule enabled whites to believe in the fantasy of their own racial purity. By extension, blacks also came to embrace rigid notions of their relative purity from whiteness.

BUT LOOK closely at the historical record and you'll find that plenty of prominent black political figures were at least half white, including Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. In addition to his African ancestry, W.E.B. Du Bois could trace his roots back to France and the Netherlands. During Reconstruction, all but three of the 23 blacks in the House and Senate were some mixture of black and white. The list goes on.

The difference between now and then, of course, is the element of choice. Barack Obama does not remind Americans of the racial divide or of the chains that first created it. Instead, he points to an alternative history that Americans have never been able to achieve. "Symbolically, Obama's parentage is the founding couple that America never accepted," said Werner Sollors, who teaches African American literature at Harvard.

Crouch is right: Obama does not remind us of this nation's original sin. But he does remind us of an opportunity that we as a nation are continually missing.

Critic of Oprah really insulted all black people

Critic of Oprah really insulted all black people

	Posted on Mon, Dec. 11, 2006
	IN MY OPINION Critic of Oprah really insulted all black people BY LEONARD PITTS JR. lpitts@MiamiHerald.com The rappers are mad at Oprah again. Just one rapper, actually: the gentleman who calls himself 50 Cent, but whose 1994 mug shot identifies him as prisoner No. 94R6378: Jackson, Curtis. Mr. Cent -- ''Fiddy'' to the cognoscenti -- was one of a trio of rappers (Ice Cube and Ludacris were the others) who lambasted the Queen of All Media last summer for being insufficiently willing to promote hip-hop. Now, Mr. Cent renews the attack. In an interview in Elle magazine(!), he charges Winfrey with being not black enough. Winfrey, he says, ''started out with black women's views but has been catering to middle-aged white American women for so long that she's become one herself.'' He also calls her an ''Oreo,'' which, for those not fluent in black-on-black insult, means black on the outside, white on the inside. Mr. Cent, should it not be painfully obvious from the foregoing, is an idiot. Worse, he's an idiot with a painfully transparent need for approval from the woman he has spent so much energy denigrating. I'll leave it to the mental-health community to explain what that means. I'm here only to make one point: It's not easy being O. Yeah, I know: Cry me a river. And $1.5 billion (the reported size of Winfrey's fortune) buys a lot of Kleenex. FAMOUS AND BLACK I'm not trying to engage your sympathy for the most powerful woman (sorry, Hillary, beg pardon, Condi) in America. I'm only trying to say it's a hard trick to manage, being both famous and black. Or, at least, famous to the degree that Oprah Winfrey is -- i.e., to the degree that you are recognized as readily in white homes as in black. To reach that level of renown is to find yourself pulled between competing expectations. On the one side, they praise you for ''transcending race'' -- whatever that means -- and they get resentful if you remind them of the ways you are not like them. On the other side, they are alert to any sign that you have Forgotten Where You Came From, and they will call you out if they think you're suffering racial amnesia. I've always thought Oprah Winfrey handled those competing pulls with a rare grace. She produces programming (The Legends Ball) that celebrates the passages of great black women, she promotes black authors (full disclosure: I was once one of them), she speaks out on racial issues, she makes a movie (Beloved) on the horror of slavery, she builds a school in South Africa -- and yet, somehow, white women don't fear her, still love her. Even when she rebukes them for racial insensitivity. I remember when one of those women, intending a compliment, told Winfrey she didn't think of her as black. And Oprah said, Whoa. Black, she explained, gently, but emphatically, is exactly what she is. And her predominantly white audience, as I recall, cheered. That's a minor miracle. BLACK EXPERIENCES DIFFER Granted, I watch daytime television infrequently. So maybe in those dozens of Oprah shows I haven't seen, Winfrey proves herself the black man hater and white woman worshipper that black critics often depict. But you'll forgive me if I doubt. You'll forgive me if I suspect that the Oprahs I haven't seen track pretty closely to the ones I have: celebrity interviews, pop psychology and self-actualization strategies for women of a certain age and station in life. It's hard for me to understand what's wrong with that, or inherently ''not black'' about it. 50 Cent makes the mistake a lot of white people do: assuming that there is but one monolithic black experience and that it is street, poor and hard-core. Which doesn't insult just Oprah Winfrey. It insults all of us because it denies a simple fact: Black is many things. That's something Mr. Cent should consider next time he's holed up in his mansion in Farmington, Conn. (median income $67,000, black population 1.5 percent), writing rhymes about how hard life is for poor black folks on mean streets.

The N-word, by any spelling, is still hateful

The N-word, by any spelling, is still hateful:

Posted on Mon, Dec. 04, 2006
IN MY OPINION The N-word, by any spelling, is still hateful BY LEONARD PITTS JR. lpitts@MiamiHerald.com The N-word has had few friends better than comedian Paul Mooney. Put aside that the word was long a staple of his act. Put aside the promotional pamphlet he once sent out that screamed the word in big, fat type. Consider instead what he told anyone who argued that blacks should stop using the word. He replied that he said it a hundred times every morning. ``It keeps my teeth white.'' Last week, the selfsame Paul Mooney joined the Rev. Jesse Jackson and California Rep. Maxine Waters in a news conference asking black folks to stop using the N-word. In other news, there are unconfirmed reports of pigs flying above Times Square. Mooney says he was ''cured'' of his N-word addiction by Michael Richards' infamous meltdown last month at the Laugh Factory. I tend to think he's not the only one. From strangers online to my neighbor down the street, everywhere I turn lately, I find black folk debating the stubborn insistence some of us have on using this word. Which leaves me as much vexed as pleased. More power to them for belatedly getting religion. Still, are you telling me that nearly 20 years after hip-hop made that word unavoidable, it takes some white TV actor losing his mind to make black folks see what should have been obvious all along? A FORM OF SELF-HATRED I mean, what do we learn from Richards' rant that we should not have known already from Snoop Dogg or Ice Cube? That the word is ugly? That it is hateful? That it demeans, denigrates, diminishes and denies? Anyone with the barest historical memory already knew these things. So where was black outrage when black rappers began putting that word into the minds and mouths of black children? When we -- African Americans -- began hating ourselves to a beat? And if I hear one more Negro offer a pseudo-intellectual justification for that self-loathing, I will not be responsible for my actions afterward. Don't give me the 'it means something different because we spell it with an `a' on the end'' speech. Spare me the ''it doesn't mean black, it means a bad person of any race'' load of bull. And for mercy sake, don't subject me to the addled argument profferred by John Ridley in December's Esquire. He says that, as whites feel no particular solidarity with their impoverished racial brethren in Appalachia, it is time for ''ascended blacks'' to bid farewell to, as he puts it, ``niggers.'' Don't tell me any of that, because it quails in the face of historical fact. We are talking about the word that was used as Gus Clarke's back was split open with a whip and salt was rubbed into the wounds. The word that was used when Mary Turner's baby was cut from her womb with a knife and stomped to death in its birth cries. The word that was used when James Byrd was tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged until his body was torn to pieces. NO DIFFERENCE To the people who did these things, it did not matter how it was spelled. They knew precisely what race they were referring to. And they saw no difference between ''ascended blacks'' and any other kind. Nor should that last surprise us. In the calculus of race, I am not my brother's keeper. I am my brother. Individuality is the first casualty of bigotry. Black people, like other Americans, tend to flee from the burdens and demands of history. History, ours especially, hurts too much. But what Michael Richards taught, and what blacks may be learning belatedly, is that history doesn't care. Not about your feelings, not about your rationalizations, not about your subtleties of spelling. Because they don't realize that, some blacks, Paul Mooney prominent among them, seem surprised to learn that this word still hates us. That it always has and always will. And if Richards is the catalyst that finally forces them to understand this, there's only one thing I can say to him: Thank you.