Link Banana

A bit of history was Twittered into my lap today. Jourdan Anderson writes his former master in 1865 to decline — or more accurately, ask for more details about — an invitation to return to his plantation. This may be my favorite part:

…we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty- two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio.

It’ll only prove that America is too racist to elect a black man. So says Slate’s Jacob Weisberg:

If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama’s missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.

Proof that adults always underestimate the young. In this case, their racism (emphasis mine):

Over the course of the last few months, Rasmussen has been tracking attitudes about voting for a black candidate for President.  What they have been finding is that the public is gradually becoming more willing to support such a candidate, but what is most striking in the three surveys they have done is how constant and relatively great the unwillingness to support a black candidate has been in the age group you probably least expect.  According to the three surveys, 18-29 year olds are now relatively less willing to support a black candidate than voters from other age groups. While resistance to supporting a black candidate has dropped in every other age group since February, and overall stands at just 8%, it remains basically unchanged among the youngest voters.

Steven Levitt explains and considers:

Blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)

Daniel Engbar makes a provocative suggestion: they’re three times whiter than the Celtics.

Last spring, economists Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers published a careful analysis (PDF) of league statistics and found evidence of racial bias among the referees. According to their research, the numbers of fouls called against white and black players varied depending on the race of the referees for that game—when there were more white officials on the floor, fewer fouls were called against white players. And since the majority of the league’s referees are white, this puts minority players at a disadvantage. (To be exact, the data showed only a relative effect—so it’s impossible to know which direction the bias went. White refs may favor white players, or they may discriminate against blacks. Or, black refs could just as well be favoring black players or discriminating against whites.)

The Washington Post has an interesting story about the black experience in Utah. I thought this quote were rather humorous and illustrative:

“I’ve had so many weird experiences like that,” said Griffin. “I went to San Francisco, and people didn’t stare at me. And it made me very uncomfortable, because everyone always stares at me.”

Arriving in the same city, Doriena Lee, 59, phoned her mother. “Guess what,” she said, “there are lots of us here!” Raised in Salt Lake, a city with so few, “I didn’t think there were very many black people in the world.”

(via MeFi)

There’s good reason to find Colson Whitehead’s piece “too clever by half,” but I enjoyed it.

People think I have it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, what with the whole having to be everywhere in the country at once thing. One second I’m nodding enthusiastically in a sales conference in Boise, Idaho, and the next I’m separating conjoined triplets at the Institute For Terribly Complicated Surgery in Buchanan, N.Y., and then I have to rush out to Muncie, Ind., to put my little “Inspector 12” tag in a bag of Fruit of the Loom.

It’s exhausting, all that travel. Decent, hard-working folks out there have their religion and their xenophobia to cling to. All I have is a fistful of upgrades to first class and free headphones. Headphones That Should Have Gone to a More Deserving Passenger.

I know admittedly little about the black leader Marcus Garvey, but I found this quote — from Paul Devlin’s review of Negro With a Hat — striking:

Garvey is quoted as having said: “We were the first Fascists. … When we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown, [and] Mussolini copied our Fascism.” Garvey’s “we” was his Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.), an organization that spread like brush fire from Harlem to black communities across the United States, the Caribbean and Central America, acquiring hundreds of thousands of members. The quotation about Fascism, in the context of Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, sheds light on the befuddlement of both Du Bois and J. Edgar Hoover, neither of whom knew quite what to make of the anti-union, non-Socialist, non-Bolshevik, non-Democrat, non-Republican organizer and orator with (in Grant’s words) a “haunting and melodious voice.”

Roger Cohen asked an interesting question in today’s column:

Why, I wondered as I viewed the exhibit, does the Holocaust, a German crime, hold pride of place over U.S. lynchings in American memorialization?

Let’s be clear: I am not comparing Jim Crow with industrialized mass murder, or suggesting an exact Klan-Nazi moral equivalency. But I do think some psychological displacement is at work when a magnificent Holocaust Memorial Museum, in which the criminals are not Americans, precedes a Washington institution of equivalent stature dedicated to the saga of national violence that is slavery and segregation.

Ta-Nehisi Coates essay about Bill Cosby sometimes diverges too far into how the two men disagree, but on the whole is at least worth a look. An interesting passage:

The notion of the Great Fall, and the attendant theory that segregation gave rise to some “good things,” are the stock-in-trade of what Christopher Alan Bracey, a law professor at Washington University, calls (in his book, Saviors or Sellouts) the “organic” black conservative tradition: conservatives who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention, but whose black-nationalist leanings make them anathema to the Heritage Foundation and Rush Limbaugh. When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him. This is the audience that flocks to Cosby: culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.

In an interesting piece devoid of any verifiable information, Beverly Gage raises the possibility that Warren G. Harding was really the first “black” president of the United States. The closest she gets toward actually asserting the veracity of the account is here:

In the decades since, many biographers have dismissed the rumors of Harding’s mixed-race family as little more than a political scandal and Chancellor himself as a Democratic mudslinger and racist ideologue. But as with the long-denied and now all-but-proved allegations of Thomas Jefferson’s affair with his slave Sally Hemings, there is reason to question the denials. From the perspective of 2008, when interracial sex is seen as a historical fact of life instead of an abomination, the circumstantial case for Harding’s mixed-race ancestry is intriguing though not definitive.

Michael Eric Dyson makes some interesting points in this LA Times Op-Ed. Pointing to some of Dr. King’s controversial statements made after 1965 to mostly black audiences, he says that Revered Wright is clearly a descendent of King’s split opinion on race.

Perhaps nothing might surprise — or shock — white Americans more than to discover that King said in 1967: “I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.” In a sermon to his congregation in 1968, King openly questioned whether blacks should celebrate the nation’s 1976 bicentennial. “You know why?” King asked. “Because it [the Declaration of Independence] has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives.” 

These details from Eduardo Porter depress me.

Americans are not less generous than Europeans. When private charities are included, they probably spend more money for social purposes than Europeans do. But philanthropy allows them to target spending on those they personally believe are deserving, instead of allowing the government to choose.

Mr. Glaeser’s and Mr. Alesina’s work suggests that white Europeans support a big welfare state because they believe the money will probably go to other white Europeans. In America, the Harvard economist Erzo F. P. Luttmer found that support for social spending among respondents to General Social Survey polls increased in tandem with the share of welfare recipients in the area who were in their own racial group. A study of charity by Daniel Hungerman, a Notre Dame economist, found that all-white congregations become less charitably active as the share of black residents in the local community grows.

Not only do white patrons tip black drivers less than white drivers, but blacks do too. The same holds true for wait staff:

A cross-tab of the raw data (generously emailed to me by Lynn) shows that white customers tipped black servers almost four percentage points less than white servers and that black customers tipped black servers half a percentage point less.

This, however, is where it gets really interesting:

But as a law professor what is most interesting about Lynn’s article is his suggestion that an employer might be held liable under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act for establishing a tipping policy that has a disparate impact against African-American employees.

(via Marginal Revolution)

I apologize for bringing this up over and over again, but this dialogue between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury is the deepest and most penetrating discussion about race and Obama’s speech that I’ve seen thus far. (If you’re impatient, you may want to skip the first ten minutes.) Would that cable news commentators were half this good.

Bonus: The latest music video made by Barack Obama supporters. (via Coudal Fresh)

Apologies to those — including Mr. Obama’s campaign — already tired of hearing about it, but Dan Schnur had something interesting to say about Barack Obama’s now-everywhere speech.

It was another conciliator from a distant era whose advice was perhaps most useful as Barack Obama prepared to explain his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “If a problem cannot be solved,” Dwight Eisenhower once said. “Enlarge it.”

The Daily Intelligencer has compiled a useful roundup of opinions on yesterday’s speech by the usual suspects. As you could expect, the right generally denigrated it and the left generally praised it. But, if you actually read the list you’ll get the nuances within those positions.

On a lighter note, The Onion reports that no one wants to give that black guy change.

Related to Barack Obama’s speech, Christopher Hayes makes an interesting — if controversial — point that deserves wider airing:

Imagine for a moment that you are pro-life. You believe that each abortion represents the murder of an innocent child. And as it stands despite protests and lawsuits and bills passed in the state legislatures, and organizing and marching and lobbying and petitioning, abortion in America remains legal and each year over 1 million innocent children are murdered. Yet America continues to stand idly by and allow this mass slaughter. If you were religious, you might think that God judged America harshly for this crime, for the nation’s continuing indifference, and you might even think that God damns America for its tolerance of a holocaust.

It’s hard to imagine, though, that if a Republican presidential candidate were running for president and had a preacher with the views spelled out above, that it would cause much of a stir, or even register a blip in the brain-dead oscillations of the twenty-four-hour, scandal-cycle EKG. And yet here we are, five or six news cycles into an ongoing firestorm over a few seconds of two different sermons delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Barack Obama’s (and Oprah Winfrey’s) Chicago church, and a man who Obama says “brought me to Jesus.” Just five minutes watching cable news coverage of the “scandal” and it’s hard not to conclude the episode represents just about everything repellent and degraded about the nation’s public discourse on religion, politics and race.

(via Ross Douthat)

Aside from being a barely passable imitator of the man, SNL’s Fred Armisen plays him in “honeyface.” Given the amount of stink that was raised about Angelina Jolie maybe wearing makeup in A Mighty Heart, I’m surprised this was the first I’d heard of it.

I feel a certain amount of shame that South Africa’s race relations sound only a little worse than those in the United States. You’d think that our 25 (or, depending on how you count, 125) year head start would count for something. (I know that’s reductive, but it doesn’t change the feeling.)

Though the poor and unemployed remain disproportionately black, an emerging black middle class is slowly blurring racial and social lines. Once-segregated schools and universities now include students of all colours. Even at the formerly all-white University of the Free State, where the racist video was shot and where tuition was once in Afrikaans (the language of the early Dutch settlers), most students are now black. A rising majority of South Africans think that race relations are improving.

Yet South Africa is far from colour-blind. People of different races often eat in the same restaurants—but at different tables. Peaceful coexistence, which South Africa generally enjoys, does not mean integration. People in rural areas are even less likely to mix than those in large cities such as Johannesburg.