...does not mean you have the automatic and absolute right to everything, especially other peoples children. "Well, we have so much, we can give these children a better life." Yeah, great American parenting skills abound - from O.J. and Madonna and Brittany and Angelina.

China's policy has some flaws and maybe some see unfairness. BUT IT IS THEIR POLICY. They are a sovereign nation and they do not owe middle-class White Americans their children at the drop of a hat and without question.

Yep, lots of children in the U.S. to adopt and foster; lots of children from the Carribean, Africa, Mexico and South America. BUT, White Americans have decided that China is the Whole Foods of Adoption and they can go in and pick up a baby like a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck, without being question. Chinese girl babies are so appealing because culturally white Americans see them as "easy" to deal with, racially, more accepting. You think the Chinese government didn't finally figure this out?

"Think of those poor orphans who'll languish now." Oh yeah, well you ain't thinking about the available for adoption children in the places I reference above.

A bunch of selfish bullies we are that honestly believe, no matter our political persuasion, the rest of the world is our shopping center. The fractured family is the norm here. Racism is the norm here. The Chinese want the girls taken from their land to know their culture, their heritage. Nothing wrong with that.

Need something to love so badly you want to waltz in, grab it up, and waltz out? Buy a puppy or a Beamer. Or better yet, go to Appalachia and pick yourselves up a nice white baby, since Chinese baby girls seem to be the sloppy seconds of adoption.

>>In the age of gyms and McDonalds, of Hagendaas commercials and health education, big butts are an unhealthy spectacle and weighty commentary on our times.<<

I'm sure Venus's captors never considered giving her fae for the journey back home. It was her captors who found themselves in financial disrepair and used their servant for lurid performance art to save them from bankruptcy court. I reckon that Venus didn't know the full scale of the English language, of disavantageous situations, and being a child herself (she was a young teenagager for God's sake)didn't possess the where-withall to break assess the dire situation she was placed in. She trusted her captors and she got screwed.

How would you like to be placed on public display for someone's elese profit and career? White America always seems to avoid this question. "How would you feel...".

Oh, and those scientists and anthropologists that displayed her genitals in pickle jars? They're straight-to-hell-assholes that knew what they were doing and knew better for doing it. Venus's treatment was RACIST AS HELL, INHUMANE. Proof: they never did this to any Caucasian woman (and like today there are tons (no pun intended) of Nordic honeys with huge asses and hanging labias that could have been on display. Why didn't they go out and find a white Venus to treat like this?

Venus was chattel, like anyone else of her race.

"The best work God ever did was put a black woman's ass on a white woman". I saw that quote written on a Illinois Central train depot wall in Chiago in the 70's when I was twelve years old. I'll bet it was written by some deranged white guy.

Fat women represent fertility, a proper life mate("she can eat, so she can cook"), a sign of comfort that the world is not so bad off and one can still cop a meal.

Yep, padding extra weight around - we can all do something about that - and we should. But Venus is a cautionary tale, her lesson is that we haven't changed much at all since she lived. We prostitute the female form, the more outrageous it is, the more we lear. Nicole Ritchie? Kira Knightley? I doubt if these girls even have menustral cycles anymore, they're so bony. But we lap them up. Both are probably far more unhealthy than the comedian Monique.

Fat-bottomed girls really do make the rockin' world go 'round.

Is this what Ms. Dickerson has become? Just a bomb thrower with a word processor?

I used to like her, but her writing of late totally bites.

I'm a black Chicagoan, and ten years ago Mr. Obama was "too black". Congressman Bobby Rush ran a smear campaign against Obama when (he) challenged him for his U.S. Congressional seat, telling everyone that Obama was a gang member, hence his given name, of course. Yep, that Bobby Rush - Mr. Black Panther of 1968.

And now we have a blacker-than-black writer who writes that Obama just isn't the true experience of black folk' in America. Well, I suppose she could just write-in Chris Rock, Jay-Z or somebody.

Perhaps Ms. Dickerson's discomfort with Mr. Obama lies in the fact taht he's not a religious charlatan, a poverty pimp, a former dealer turn (former) hit-making rapper turned politician? Ah, perhaps that would be the balm to assuage her discomfort with her Oreo brotha' - 'cause that's what this long-winded diatribe is gettin' to, and she knows it.

Maybe it's Ms. Dickerson's discomfort with her own personal choices - marrying and divorcing a white man, birthing bi-racial children. Maybe if she could flip the racial DNA of Mr. Obama's parents - make his mother black and his father from Sweden or soemthing?

The bottom line is Ms. Dickerson has become a very very very bad writer. She is the Ann Coulter of the liberal press. Two-hundred replies to her article must make her quite sassy-fied, indeed.

Debra Dickerson - you are just another "nigger at the bottom of the crab barrel". God help you if another nigger is going to escape your narrowly defined black persepctive/experience! Oh, and I'm sure she doesn't mind me saying that since I'm black and all and from the inner-city and I still eat chitlins on Thanksgiving and I can't for the life of me pull a comb straight through my head without hittin' a kink. A true black callin' out fam'ly is all I am's.

Salon - lots of black folks out there writing. Get some, will you? I can get Slate for free, I don't have to continue to pay for piss-ant mastabatory perspectives.