Link Banana

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.)

Speaking of the senator, Daily Intel received a rather strange email from the people selling dolls that seems to imply the Democratic candidate is a monkey:

We at TheSockObama Co. are saddened that some individuals have chosen to misinterpret our plush toy. It is not, nor has it ever been our objective to hurt, dismay or anger anyone. We guess there is an element of naviete on our part, in that we don’t think in terms of myths, fables, fairy tales and folklore. We simply made a casual and affectionate observation one night, and a charming association between a candidate and a toy we had when we were little. We wonder now if this might be a great opportunity to take this moment to really try and transcend still existing racial biases. We think that if we can do this together, maybe it will behoove us a nation and maybe we’ll even begin to truly communicate with one another more tenderly, more real even.

This is only our introductory plush toy. If we choose to move forward with a Republican candidate, we’ll begin with an elongated and slightly lumpy, fuzzy Idaho potato. Had a different Democratic candidate won the nomination, we were prepared to move forward with the cutest, fluffiest 12” chestnut and golden-haired squirrel, with a short Farrah-like do in a brown pantsuit and call her Squirellary.

I was struck by an article in the New York Times Book Review because, well, I’d never heard of the Colfax Massacre. Or perhaps I’d forgotten. In any case, it’s interesting reading about an important — and shameful — American event.

In the middle of the Colfax, La., cemetery stands a 12-foot-high obelisk. It’s weathered now. But in its day it must have been a grand sight, towering over the rows of gravestones, its marble glinting in the Southern sun. The monument was built as a tribute to three local white men, “the heroes,” according to its inscription, “who fell in the Colfax riot fighting for white supremacy” on April 13, 1873 — Easter Sunday. There is no mention of the estimated 81 black people who were murdered that day.

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.

It was the best title I could muster… Nicholas Kristof wrote a column yesterday that mentioned a test I’d never tried. (I would have linked to it yesterday, but the site was New York Times‘d.) You’re shown black and white men holding either guns or cellphones. You’re supposed to shoot those with guns and holster your weapon for those with a cellphone. It’s goal is to test if your response times differ because the men’s race. Such a difference is seen as proof of an “implicit” bias that you probably didn’t know you had. It’s the same purpose as these tests, which I had seen before.

You know, the one that cast LeBron James as King Kong and Gisele Bündchen as that distressed blonde Fay Wray. Or not. Wesley Morris thinks it’s much less interesting than the rest of us did.

I, for one, have racism fatigue. I’m wiped out. Between the outrage over Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problems and Bill Clinton’s unbelievable mutation from American’s first black president into Karl Rove, I don’t have the bandwidth to fight Anna Wintour. Seeing that cover as purely racist doesn’t give the people looking at it enough credit. It dates Vogue for relying on the allusion but it also dates us for going crazy over it. Racial hysteria is the old black. Maybe it’s so old it’s avant-garde—veryVogue.

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)

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.

Orlando Patterson makes the claim that “controversial” wouldn’t begin to explain.

The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino.

Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business suit at 3 a.m., answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.

The New Republic does the unexpected: asks what white supremacists think of Obama’s success and possible succession to the Oval Office. The answer: not much of interest, although there’s some fun speculation:

But there may be one more factor at work: hatred overload. It’s a testament of sorts to Hillary Clinton that, by virtue of her cartoonish image as a leftist man-hating shrew, she manages to arouse more vitriol among white supremacists than a black man. Meanwhile, white racists absolutely despise John McCain for his support of George W. Bush’s immigration reform plan, which they view as a dire threat to America’s European-based culture. “I don’t think Obama will be any more negative for the United States than Hillary or John McCain,” explains Duke. “In fact,” he added, “we probably have less preference for a European like a John McCain or a Hillary who has betrayed our interests, our heritage, our rights.”

… Who knows, maybe David Duke can form the oddest MySpace group of all time: Klansmen for Obama. Now that would be post-racial.

(via Slate)

My apologies for the cringe-worthy title — it took all my creativity to think of and now I can’t think of another. Despite that, Carol Paik’s essay about how she’s really not Vera Wang but has made similar mistakes is unexpectedly funny.

Christopher Hitchens has an incisive essay about Mike Huckabee’s “straightfoward racist appeal” about the Confederate flag in South Carolina and uses it to make some interesting comments about race in America. He begins:

In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about “race” as long as it is guaranteed to be phony, but never when it is real. Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word lynch in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and you can see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing (and perhaps for reasons having to do with other “sensitivities” as well).