Thoughtless and Racist.

I’m going to be vague on location here to avoid giving away too much, but I had a friend who just had to interview a group of homeowners in a portion of the northeast that’s very wealthy and smugly liberal. The group was concerned about a mixed-income housing unit going through the zoning approval process. These folks were going to get some new neighbors, and they didn’t like it. They actually feared it, and said so on the record.

Officially, the group was upset about increasing traffic, and that the plan called for some units’ backyards to face the street, forcing them to look at backyard things like playsets and grills. Zoning officials addressed those concerns, but residents were still not happy. When a group of a dozen neighbors called my friend over to their swanky townhouse complex, which is on the border between well-off and less well-off sections of the city, some unofficial objections leaked out through the aggressive use of pronouns.

I mean, why do they all have to live in this side of the city. Right?

Last week, this same town filled all three available board of education spots with candidates who came out against “heterogeneous classrooms,” which are experimental classes in some local middle schools that do away with the former method of grouping kids by ability. Ability is assessed at way too tender an age, and in suburban schools the achievement gap by and large splits black and Latino students from their white peers. The idea used to be that kids learned best in similarly abled groups, but it turns out that idea hurts lower-achieving students and does little if anything to help higher-achieving ones. This parental fear that lower-achieving kids are somehow going to infect the higher-scoring ones with their stupidity has no merit. I can’t say for certain that heterogeneous classrooms were the deciding factors in the elections, but it was a big issue during the campaign and those who supported them lost.

I don’t see the harm in calling “ability grouping” what it really is: segregation. And I see no harm in calling the condo-folks’ efforts what they really are: unofficial redlining. They believe lower-income residents, largely black and Latino, will lower their property values, blight their neighborhoods because they don’t make home improvements and use their pools without permission (kids knock on their doors in the summer to ask to use their pools, and are turned away.) But what really worries the residents is that people who don’t look like them will be so woven into their lives that they see their backyard playsets every day, that they can’t tell one yard from the next.

The people in the townhouses trying to guard their suburban idyll will tell you it has nothing to do with race, and I think they actually believe it. They were all white, young professionals who aren’t among the wealthiest in the city. This area went heavily for Obama last year, and in general aggressively pursues affordable housing projects like this one. It’s a city outwardly concerned with equality and opportunity for all but at the same time people gripe about the taxes and policies used to provide services for them.

Both these instances made me think about the controversy after a New Mexican hotel owner asked his workers to Anglicize their names. For some, it was a shock to call this racist. I learned about it when I saw a CNN banner that read “Racist, or Thoughtless?”

As if people can’t be thoughtlessly racist. In fact, people are more often thoughtlessly racist than they are aggressively so.

Which is why I was the only person on Jimmy Carter’s side when he called out the obvious racism against Obama. I know the argument against his having said it; that it’s not helpful, only puts people on the defensive and shuts down conversation. But I have a certain affinity for a fellow white Southerner who sees racism from a different angle, when it’s spoken in closed company by people who assume you agree with them. That’s what upset my friend the most; the homeowners spoke to her as if she knew what they were trying to say. They call it dog-whistling for a reason: It’s under the surface until you call it up and address it, and white Americans just don’t have these conversations that often, if ever.

Protecting American Values From Extremists.

(x-posted from U.S. of J.)

I agree with conservatives like David Horowitz and John Hinderacker; in light of the shooting at Ft. Hood, we need to reassert and protect our values. The question of course, is the who we’re protecting our values from. Hint: it’s not Muslims. But first, a few quick points about Muslim-American attitudes:

1. Muslim-American are overwhelmingly happy with their place in the United States:

 

Back in 2007, the Pew Research Center released the first comprehensive survey of Muslim-American attitudes. According to the survey, nearly eight out of ten Muslim-Americans say that they are happy with their lives in the United States. To break that down a bit, 24 percent of Muslim Americans would say that they are “very happy” with their lives, 54 percent would say that they are “pretty happy,” and only 18 percent would say “not too happy.” Among the general public, those numbers are 36 percent, 51 percent and 12 percent respectively. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Most Muslim-Americans see no conflict between religious commitment and living in a modern society:

63 percent of Muslim-Americans say that they see no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society. What’s more, a strong plurality of Muslims (43 percent) say that Muslims coming to America today should adopt American customs. By contrast, only 26 percent say that they should remain distinct, and 16 percent say that they should try both. Indeed, reading through the report, the vast majority of data suggests that on the whole, Muslims are glad to be in the United States and happy with the opportunities the country provides them.

Unfortunately, a good majority of Muslims are also worried about various forms of discrimination, racism, prejudice and stereotyping. 19 percent of Muslims say that they are worried about discrimination/racism/prejudice, 15 percent are worried about being viewed as terrorists, 14 percent are worried about ignorance of Islam, and 12 percent are worried about stereotyping.

This is a really important point. Contra the Hinderaker’s and Horowitz’s, we have absolutely nothing to fear from the 2.5 million Muslims who call the United States home. It’s to our credit as Americans that we have built a society where people of different religious beliefs and cultural traditions can live and work in peace without fear of harassment. Insofar that we should worry about anything, it’s those who would ostracize Muslims and use the weight of the federal government to isolate them. Anger and hostility breed hatred and extremism, and if we want to remain a society committed to tolerance and mutual respect, then we should work our hardest to marginalize anti-Muslim voices.

Your Monday Random-Ass Roundup: Reviewing the Hyper Bowl

We should all be afraid. House minority leader John Boehner calls health care reform “the greatest threat to freedom I have seen in my 19 years in Washington.”

And Boehner would never lie, right?

In the end, Democratic leadership threw a party. Republicans threw a fit. And women desiring the right to choose definitely lost.

Anyway, there’s a lot to cover today. So let’s just get into it, shall we? But not too deeply, because reading is hard:

1. Steve Benen offers a quick primer on what’s in the House Bill. “If you have insurance, you’ll have better, more stable coverage with consumer protections. If you don’t have insurance, you’ll get subsidies to help you purchase coverage from an exchange…The House bill is expensive, but it’s fully paid for, and would lower the federal budget deficit over the next couple of decades. It includes a public option for eligible consumers, an individual mandate, and an employer mandate. It would cover about 96% of the population, and does not raise taxes on the middle class.” (G.D.)

2. A TPM reader predicts that the 2012 elections, not next year’s, will prove to be the greatest vulnerability to health care reform. “The mandates that will drive up costs will take effect before then–young people will pay much more since premiums will be equalized for all age groups and private companies will have to cover even sick people. Since there will be no opt-out or no competition, they will be able to charge whatever they want.” (Quadmoniker)

3. In the midst of all the conversations about health insurance, there hasn’t been as much conversation about the rising cost of health care and what can possibly be done to stop it. Just to give an idea, at the current rate of growth, nine years from now the average American family is expected to pay $38,000 per year on health care – about half of their projected income. The team at This American Life in collaboration with NPR News have supplied not one, but two great podcasts for anyone who needs a primer on the issue. (Alisa)

4. William Saletan at Slate: “I’m not saying we shouldn’t socialize health insurance. I’m pretty comfortable with the House and Senate bills. But let’s give up the two lies we tell ourselves about such legislation. One is that it won’t cost us much money. The other is that it won’t cost us much choice. When you throw in your lot with other people and agree to play by the same rules, you surrender some of your freedom and risk losing some of your options. Sometimes it’s coverage of an MRI or a hip replacement. Sometimes it’s coverage of abortion. If that’s the price of health care reform, are you willing to pay it?” (Belleisa)

5. Some Democrats are already pushing back against an amendment in the bill that limits access to abortion. (G.D.)

6. Speaking of the Stupak amendment, Meredith Simmons explains why some women might have to choose between health care or an abortion. (Belleisa)

7. The Times profiles Joseph Cao, the lone Republican who voted for the House bill. Cao became the first Vietnamese American in Congress in 2008 when he upset Congressional Black Caucus mainstay (and now convicted felon) “Dollar” Bill Jefferson to win the seat for Louisana’s overwhelmingly black, Democratic 2nd district. His district’s makeup seemed to affect his thinking. “I had to make a decision of conscience based on the needs of the people of my district,” he told the Times. “A lot of my constituents are uninsured, a lot of them are poor.” (G.D.)

8. Also, Cao should probably check his seat before sitting down in the coming days: Cao, who said he was sitting next to Republican Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., during the historic vote Saturday night, was asked whether he felt courageous or lonely after the vote. “I feel both courageous and lonely,” he said. (Blackink)

9. And already, conservatives are pursuing a Cao cleansing. (Blackink)

10. Feministing on “some of the positive things included in the House health reform bill.” (Belleisa)

11. ABC  is reporting that intelligence agencies knew that Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman in the mass shooting at Fort Hood, had tried to contact al Qaeda. (G.D.)

12. For more background about Hasan, here’s a link from the NYT. For irresponsible speculation from Joe Lieberman, check out this link. (Blackink)

13. The Orlando man who shot and killed one person and injured five others has been portrayed as “a mentally ill man who fell victim to countless personal and financial problems.” (Blackink)

14. To honor the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, TNR assembles archived links from that period. Michael Tomasky links to a piece revisiting whom he credits for the end of the Cold War (hint, it’s not Reagan or Gorbachev). Anne Applebaum reflects upon how far Central Europe has come in the past two decades. And the Huff Post has some pictures. (Blackink)

15. Yglesias on the hidebound Senate: “It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the fact that in a unicameral United States of America, we would now have passed both a comprehensive health care reform bill and also the most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world. Now that’s not the world we live in. Instead we live in a world where neither of those things have passed and where their prospects aren’t clear. But think back on this point the next time you hear someone say Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not centrist enough, or else that Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not left-wing enough.” (G.D.)

16. California may already be a failed state, says Robert Cruickshank of Calitics, but there’s still hope. (Blackink)

17. A group of progressives are organizing a donor boycott of the DNC, hoping to push President Obama to honor his campaign promises to the LGBT community. (Blackink)

18. It’s always good news for conservatives at The Weekly Standard. And, as John Cole notes, it’s also always contrarian good news. (Blackink)

19. Courtney Martin, one of the finalists in The Washington Post’s “Next Great Pundit” contest, ponders the male alternative to Tucker Max at the National Conference for Campus-Based Men’s Gender Equality and Anti-Violence Groups in Minnesota. (Blackink)

20. Precious’s Gabby Sidibe got jokes. (G.D.)

21. Wiley Pitts revisits the “fuckery” (a fantastic word) that is the story of Anthony Sowell. Everyone deserves a bit of fail here.  (Blackink)

22. In a recent study of D.C. high school students, surveyors found that parents or guardians, health workers, teachers, friends, and boyfriends or girlfriends were their most common sources of sexual information. Which means they probably weren’t learning much about sex at all. (Blackink)

23. Responding to Playboy cover girl Joana Krupa, Kate Harding answers the question, “why don’t feminists think porn empowers women?” (Belleisa)

24. Divining the difference between douchebags and bros. (Blackink)

25. From the Boston Review: “Wikipedians are 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, and around 70 percent of them are under the age of 30.” (Belleisa)

26. Over at TheRoot.com, John McWhorter points out 10 books about race “that should be more widely read.” And Thomas Sowell is involved. (Belleisa)

27. Long story short: 50 Cent is ridiculous. (Blackink)

28. Jeremy Tyler, the first U.S. basketball player to skip his senior year of high school to play pro ball overseas, is off to a rough start in Israel. How rough? “As Tyler walked away, he bade farewell to a reporter leaving for the United States and said, ‘I wish I was going back with you.’” (Blackink)

29. If you have seen the latest pictures of former Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa, then you’ll understand why David Love at The Grio has some serious problems with the, um, ghostly images. (Blackink)

30. This horrifying moment, from Oregon State’s victory over Cal on Saturday, is a reminder of why all my football coaches told me to never leave my feet during a game. (Blackink)

I think you’ll all agree: this was a pretty random roundup, with some ass throw in for good measure. I’m talking specifically about Stupak and Lieberman.

Have a fantastic Monday!

Precious.

Since seeing Precious on Friday, I’ve been trying to recall another recent onscreen portrayal of evil anywhere as effective as the one offered up by Mo’Nique in the role of the title character’s mother. Javier Bardem’s unrelenting assassin in “No Country for Old Men” might qualify, but he was essentially a cartoon. Maybe Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil tycoon in “There Will Be Blood,” but even that sociopath seemed to have other drives (like towering greed) besides perpetuating human suffering. Not so Mo’Nique’s Mary, an absolute monster who is devoid of any redeeming qualities. She commits an atrocity in every scene she inhabits, and so the tiny, dim apartment she shares with Precious isn’t just suffocating, but terrifying. It’s the most powerful performance in a movie full of them.

But the movie’s uniformly excellent acting underscores the other problems with Lee Daniels’ direction. To be fair, it would be hard to pull off subtlety in a movie in which the morbidly obese, illiterate protagonist is routinely sexually and physically abused, impregnated by her father, and ignored by anyone else she comes across. But given all that, there’s certainly no need to pile on, which is what Daniels does, intersplicing bright, tonally dissonant fantasy sequences into the main character’s more traumatic moments. As her father rapes her, she transports into a  daydream in which she’s a beloved celebrity; when she’s attacked by some dudes on the street, she entertains thoughts of dancing flirtily with some guy on the set of a music video. We get it: she wants to be anywhere but where she is in those moments. But when we’re talking about a character for whom personal degradation is a daily occurrence, it seems like that sentiment wouldn’t need any additional highlighting. Like the scene where Precious is getting ready for school and sees a blonde white girl aping her movements in the mirror, these flourishes are way, way too on the nose.*

Mad Men, Season 3, Ep. 13: Shut the Door, Have a Seat.

The great strength of Mad Men’s finales always seems to be their hotly anticipated one-on-one interactions between characters.

Digging In The Crates: Race and I.Q.

The following post was originally published in December 2007. We’re re-running it as it touches on a major component of our next Book of the Month pick, Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side.

Michael Oher was born in the 1980s on the desperately poor, black side of Memphis. His father was murdered shortly after he was born. His mother was a crackhead. By the time he was an adolescent, he’d been in nearly a dozen different schools. One obese foster parent, who took him in for the money she would get from the state, would sit on him to punish him. A test put his I.Q. in the low 80s, which meant that the little boy was mentally retarded.

But in a strange, sitcom-ish confluence of events, Oher ended up on the other side of Memphis, the adoptive son of a the Tuohys, a wealthy, white Republican family with pull all over town. “Big Mike” —- he was six-foot-six and over 325 lbs. —– went from being undernourished and wearing the same clothes every day to flying around in his adoptive father’s private jet, attending private school, and getting a Mercedes as a birthday present. The Tuohys hired a left-leaning school teacher named Sue Mitchell (“We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!” Mr. Tuohy said) to drill Mike and make up for the educational deficit he’d accrued during his sad childhood. When his I.Q. was measured again as he got closer to graduating high school, it was in the low 100s — which meant he possessed about average intelligence. (Oh, yeah. Here’s the even more unlikely happy ending: Big Mike is an athletic freak of nature and is a likely first round NFL draft pick, which will make him more wealthy than his parents, and a movie about his life is in the works.)

The psychologists who administered the second test to Big Mike were stunned. How does one kid’s I.Q. jump 20 points in less than a decade? How elastic is I.Q.? And how much of a role does environment play in determining it?

A Programming Note.

In addition to moderating the dry runs for our forthcoming podcast and helping us switch hosting services, PB’s jill-of-all-trades Shani-o is pulling guest-blogger duty over at The American Prospect’s TAPPED blog.  (And she’s dangerously excited like Jesse Spano!)

Go holler at her there!

Denialism.

Michael Specter, a New Yorker science writer, has written a new book accusing Americans of being stupid about science. It’s not that I don’t agree with him. I just have one quibble.

I have to caution: I haven’t actually read the book. But I have heard him on several radio shows promoting it. He is especially hard in these interviews on those who believe organic or “natural” diets is the only safe way to eat. I couldn’t agree more. While I do prefer organic foods myself, Americans are unhealthy because they don’t eat vegetables at all, pesticides or no. And believing the natural world is somehow better for you than the mechanical and technological world in which we’ve cocooned ourselves ignores most of human history. It’s a relatively new thing that we’re living past 30 or 40, and it’s not just because we were hunted by predators. The world is dangerous for us, and there’s really no concrete divide between the natural world and the manufactured one. Though we can never prove for certain that the chemical BPA doesn’t cause cancer, we already know about viruses and natural plants like tobacco that definitely do. You’ll do yourself a lot more harm by never getting a vaccine for, say, HPV than you will help yourself by drinking out of a Sigg.

In these interviews, Specter goes off on folks who protest genetically modified foods, but I think he mischaracterizes their objections and the benefits. First, he says those who object protest what these foods might do to harm humans. While there are some out there who fear that without evidence, there are bigger objections to those who are uncertain about what the introduction of new genetic material might do to ecological health. That’s a pretty rational fear when one considers what introducing chemical fertilizers and pesticides did to the environment; the truth is we usually don’t know how the food chain could react, and how pests could adjust.

Second, he argues that these genetically modified foods could benefit the many hungry people on our planet by making more food more available. He needs to go back and read Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998 for showing that most of the world’s famines have to do with distribution of wealth, not actual food shortages. That’s still true now; there’s probably plenty of food on the earth, there are just some of us who eat too much of it, which was part of what the organic and locavore food arguments try to address. Genetically modified foods are not going to be used to feed hungry people, they’re going to be used to increased profits.

Specter could address these things in his book, but in interviews he’s not mentioned them, and so he’s underselling his argument.

Sacrifing Abortion.

Was the amendment restricting insurers that get federal dollars from paying for abortions a necessary evil to get health reform passed? Probably. It’s a heartbreaking setback, and, as Emily Bazelon points out in Double X, this only hurts poor women.

Just to keep things in perspective, though, women without health insurance don’t have abortions paid for now. I’d rather be certain that all women are getting the gynecological care they need, including effective birth control, than fight this battle right now.

Friday Random Ten.

From the creative, dynamic and thoroughly Roots-addled mind (at least this week) of Shani-o, we’re celebrating Black Thought Appreciation Week here at PostBourgie. It all started with this hot fire of a cypher including Mos Def and Eminem that G.D. posted in this spot last week.

But really, does there  need to be an explanation for why we’re showing Thought some love?

Here’s the link to our Twitter feed commemorating the occasion.

Now. I shall. Proceed …

1. Water (Shani-o)

2. Quills (Blackink)

3. No Alibi (Shani-o)

4. Stay Cool (Blackink)

5. Thought @ Work (Shani-o)

 

6. Web (Shani-o)

7. Livin’ in a New World (Blackink)

8. 75 Bars (Shani-o)

9. Reality TV (Blackink)

10. Silent Treatment (this was a suggestion from Mr. Adam Serwer. A damn good one at that)

And if we missed anything, I’m sure G.D. will be around a little later in the comments to chin-check us.

As always, hope you all have a great weekend.

Making Sense of the Senseless.

James Fallows:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don’t mean nothing.

Ten years ago, when I was a reporter at my college newspaper, Larry Gene Ashbrook walked into a Fort Worth, Texas, Baptist church and opened fire, killing seven and injuring seven more. He then turned the gun on himself.

When I arrived at the grisly scene later that evening, I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of evil – or  mental illness, or both – would compel someone to wreak that sort of havoc on a group of innocent people.

The wondering has never ceased.

As if divining a motive would make things better.

This shit is really complicated. We don’t have any answers, and we might never have any.  It really doesn’t matter either way.

Best instead to offer our thoughts and prayers to the survivors and family members of the victims at Fort Hood.

The Grape Drink Mafia.

A few years back, a cadre of liberal Jewish political bloggers like Ezra Klein, Spencer Ackerman, and Dana Goldstein began making online waves, and a lot of their critics took to calling them “the Juice Box Mafia” on account of their being so freakishly young.

The PB fam is hardly as influential, but our horde of rabble-rousing whippersnappers is rapidly expanding. (And really, what the fuck is juice?)

If you’re on Twitter, you should follow us here.

Mad Men, Season 3, Ep. 12: The Grown-Ups.

Sadly, I’ve no time for the usual overlong ruminations on every awesome little detail of this week’s Mad Men. I can only hit the major highlights and leave the rest up to you. Here goes:

Executive Mandates, Executive Power and Health Care Reform.

Getty Images

I predicted this story a few months ago; a grudging acknowledgment that President Barack Obama’s hands-off approach on health care might have been the right one after all. It’s not that I necessarily think it’s better that Obama let Congress hash out the health care plan and then let the town hall hysteria boil and dissipate on national television. It’s just that a kind of coolness and steadiness has always been his strategy, and so far it has worked.

There’s something else at work here, too. Obama seems to appreciate Congress’s place in the process. Respecting Congress might seem a hard thing to do, but it’s what presidents once did. The mini-series on John Adams, based on the biography by David McCullough, lets Adams a little off the hook for The Alien and Sedition acts because he was merely acquiescing to Congress’s will, and they had enough votes to override a veto anyway. In fact, Jon Meacham tells us in “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House” that the first six presidents rarely used their veto power, usually overriding only those acts they saw as unconstitutional.

It was Jackson, Meacham said, who used veto power for laws with which he disagreed. It became a political tool and a method for making policy. It was Jackson who first saw himself as having a popular mandate, representing the will of the people over the entrenched interests of Congress.

For many of us here, that probably seems like a good presidential philosophy as long as Obama’s in the White House. It feels like Obama is representative of the popular will, and its tempting to want him to take up the progressive mandate mantle. It’s not as though Obama’s completely against strong executive power, as we’ve argued before; he seems particularly reluctant to roll back Bush era expansions of it. But there’s something to be said for respecting the institution and the slow and steady progress it’s most inclined to make, and Obama tends to put his faith in the electoral process. American democracy can evolve in punctuated equilibrium fashion, and the South, interested from the start in establishing a different kind of America, is still fighting the rupturing battles of the 50s,  60s and 70s (even all the way back to the 30s). Change was faster then, but it came at a price. Gay rights advocates, Americans without health care and all of us breathing increasingly warm and poisoned air can point out that slow change costs us something, too. Perhaps progressives can console themselves with this; change is change, and it’s never failed to come.

Friday Random Ten

So, I’m assuming almost everyone is dressing up as a sexy nurse, a sexy pirate or a sexy gangster for Halloween this weekend. Something sexy, for sure. Or, as G.D. mentioned earlier, something potentially racist.

But not me. I plan to dress myself in pants two sizes too large, a doo-rag and something really feminine. Like a tunic. Or a wig. I’ll be going as a rejected Morehouse applicant.

That said, if you are headed out into the wild and unpredictable night on Saturday, here’s a playlist to keep the evil spirits and preteen panhandlers away:

1. Nightmares by Clipse (Jamelle)

2. Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. (Blackink)

3. Getting Scared by Imogen Heap (Shani-o)

4. Second Child by Bilal (Slb)

5. Somebody’s Watching Me by Rockwell (Blackink)

6. Monster Mash by Robert George Pickett (Belleisa)

7. Mind Playing Tricks on Me by The Geto Boys (Blackink)

8. Dracula’s Lament by Jason Segel (Slb)

9. Never Scared (remix) by Bonecrusher feat. Jadakiss, Cam’ron and Busta Rhymes (Blackink)

10. Scream by Michael & Janet Jackson (Shani-o)

Thought we were gonna include “Thriller,” huh? GTFOH.

Please, enjoy the weekend. And think sexy.

The Obamas’ Marriage.

The New York Times magazine (quadmoniker, avert your eyes) has a whale of a story this week about the relationship between Barack and Michelle Obama. It focuses more on Michelle than Barack, which makes sense because she’s been quite frank about their marriage since the campaign. There’s plenty of meat in the story, but one kind of surprising tidbit is that the Obamas haven’t shared a full-time home since 1996.

‘Damn, That Halloween Costume Is Racist!’ A Practice Post.

Our first Halloween with a black president is upon us, which almost certainly means that we will bear witness to a bevy of “edgy” costumes in which the whole joke is that the president is black.

“There’s nothing racial about this costume,” the kid in the blackface will say as he clutches a copy of the “Audacity of Hope” while being flanked by slutty “Secret Service” agents. “We’re just having some fun! I’m not a racist!”

Can you believe the gall of these hypothetical motherfuckers?

I, for one, am deeply offended by these as-yet-unworn costumes, and I invite you all to join me in preemptive indignation.

Random Midday Hotness: Spit Hot Fire.

I was listening to an interview recently with Kweli, and he was asked who was the best MC currently doing it. Without hesitation, he said Thought. Now, obviously, I’m incredibly biased. But he ain’t lyin’.

A (Ridiculous) Case for Conformity.

Latoya goes in on the second (yes, second) absurd Allison Samuels piece in Newsweek complaining about Zahara Jolie-Pitt’s “wild and unstyled, uncombed and dry” hair. In her pieces, Samuels argues that the “bonding” experience black girls have with their mothers while getting their scalps greased and hair braided is invaluable, and that having their hair “well-managed” provides girls with “pride, dignity, and self-respect.”

After pointing out that though the Ethiopian-born Zahara is black, she’s not African American, and isn’t living the cultural experience that Samuels is applying to her, Latoya writes:

The styles of childhood do not continue into our preteen years, the age when black girls normally get their first relaxers. Does [Samuels] have fond memories of her mother basing her scalp before she applied the chemicals that would straighten her hair? Or is that a ritual that is just understood as a part of growing up? Are her memories scarred with the taunts of other children? My cousins came home crying after being teased about their “beady-beads” and their “kitchens.” And who did the taunting? Many times, it was other black students. We need to stop encouraging conformity and hair hatred, because there is a logical end to the path we are walking down. Instead of fighting each other when someone’s hair doesn’t conform to our specific ideals, wouldn’t it make more sense to fight against a racist system that penalizes and politicizes certain hair styles?

In addition to co-signing all of the above, I’d like to add: eff outta here. Samuels reminisces fondly of a time when she sat between her mother’s knees, but from what I hear from friends who went through the ritual, it’s not a pleasant experience. When my sister was visiting recently, it was difficult for me to watch her braid her daughter’s hair; as my sister detangled my niece’s hair, Nili would frequently let out exaggerated cries of pain, which merely annoyed my sister. The struggle there didn’t seem enjoyable for either party.

Book of the Month: The Blind Side by Michael Lewis.

This month we’ll be reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis.

In an excerpt called “The Ballad of Big Mike,” Lewis tells the story of Michael Oher, an impoverished kid from Memphis who through a strange confluence of events ends up in the legal custody of a wealthy white family. At the time of his adoption at 16, Oher had an IQ of 80.  With his adoptive parents’ resources and support from the Christian high school he attended, his I.Q. rose by 20 to 30 points. He went from foraging through the garbage for food to traveling on his father’s private jet. It’s also worth mentioning here Oher is also a behemoth —6′5, nearly 300 lbs. and boasting a basketball player’s physical grace — so by the time he graduated high school, he was on the wish list of every top college football recruiter in the country.

Now, the ballad comes to the big screen. The movie based on the book comes out November 20th, and the trailer seems to be focused on the relationship between Oher (Quinton Aaron) and his adoptive mother Leigh Ann Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), as well as the kid’s massive size. (Frankly, the trailer is worrisome and strikes me as an “Inner City Teacher Movie.”)

What the trailer and the NYT article barely mention is Lewis’ analysis of the “evolution of the game” — specifically the left tackle, whose job it is to protect right-handed quarterbacks’ blind side from rushing defenders (hence the title). As the N.F.L. has opened up for passing offenses, left tackles have grown in importance, and are now the highest paid players after quarterbacks.  Oher, who was drafted in the first round out of Ole Miss, is an almost prototypical lineman: huge, strong and surprisingly agile.

The movie and book trailers are after the jump.

Happy Reading.

A Tracy Morgan Conundrum.

Some of Tracy Morgan’s best humor has come from bits that take advantage of his towering weirdness while not being overwhelmed by it. But listening to Terri Gross’s cringe-inducing interview with him underscored an essential, unsettling part of the experience of watching dude perform: he may actually be in need of serious help. At several points, he breaks down crying without much provocation* (a similar thing happened at a book-reading in NYC last week), and he generally comes across like a wounded, defensive child.

Part of me thinks there’s an element of cynicism in what Terri Gross called his “wild card” persona; maybe all the crazy disrobing on TV was intentional, just as his recent public lachrymosity is part of a concerted effort to roll some of that back and be Taken Seriously. And while he gets some of the choicest lines on “30 Rock,”  the running gag is that the possibly insane Tracy Jordan is enabled by producers and writers because he’s good for their bottom line. One wonders if the real-life Tracy Morgan is  even in on the joke.

*Granted, he’s talking about some rough subject matter, but in doing a press tour for a biography, it seems like he would have girded himself for the very good chance that his rough childhood may have come up.

Random Midday Hotness: This Is Thriller.

Imogen Heap covers Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Heap is an talented and fascinating musician, and her breathy piano version of this track is chilling. Oddly enough, “Thriller” is one of the few songs MJ didn’t actually write. It was written by Rod Temperton, who also wrote “Rock With You” and “Off The Wall,” as well as a spate of tracks for Heatwave, Donna Summer, and Quincy Jones.

(No video, just audio.)

[Via Morning Mellow.]

East Coast Cats and Christopher Street Boys.

Defining ‘We.’ Thoughts on Capitalism: A Love Story and Related Rants.

By Black Scientist.

So it’s no secret that there is a default of whiteness in normative culture. That is: unless otherwise noted, people are white. I think this default can be challenged in communities that are predominantly of color on an everyday level (telling stories with an anonymous “she”), but when we engage with the popular sphere (movies, tv characters, in other words “visible people” in narratives created by others and passed down to the masses), people are – generally speaking – expected and assumed to be/imagined as white.

So, knowing this, why was I still disappointed in the white-middle-class-ness that tainted the narrative of Michael Moore’s capitalism: A Love Story? Is it because he’s touted as a progressive filmmaker, and to interrogate capitalism without also challenging the normativity of whiteness is to basically suck at understanding the intersections and complexity of oppressions? A shortcoming that results in merely symbolic and short-falling attempts at being subversive. because he knows about other stuff, is he supposed to also know how to make a film that doesn’t indulge in the usual habit of seeing things through a white historical lens?

The problem i had with Moore’s film was that the “we” he constructed often translated into white middle class people. and this wasn’t something I can pretend was glaringly obvious, because it was mostly subtle. noted in the use of “we” and the implication that follows of who “they” were.

Technology Gets RNC in Trouble, Again.

You’ve probably already seen the picture of President Barack Obama eating fried chicken with the caption, “Miscegenation Is a CRIME against American values… Repeal Loving v. Virginia,” that was hastily removed from the Republican National Committee’s Facebook page.

In this case — along with the e-mails of watermelons in front of the White House and Obama bucks — it’s not clear whether anti-Obama racists don’t understand how quickly these types of things spread, or whether they just don’t think it’s wrong.