No serious white person and certainly no one who would consider voting for Obama believes he shares Wright's simplistic anger-distorted views. What we don't know and it seems we may never find out is the degree to which McCain shares the far more frightening and far more potentially consequential views of his aredent supporters, the reverends Hagee and Parsley. The former of whom is a fervent believer that the "end times" are now unfolding in the Middle East while the latter is a Christian Dominionist who would dearly love to see our Constitution and Bill of Rights shredded to be replaced by some sort of Old Testament Sharia Law. What an outrageous double standard and misplacement of where the real concerns ought to lie.

... Just like they will pretend that grammatical similarity = functional similarity when they read this.

On the other hand, I am sick to death of white people as a group. The truth. that is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in Orange County. Every day I see young white females wearing blouses over fake breasts. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think unthinkable Words when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their brand new Porsches and recordings that are so smooth it makes you ill. . . .

Here's the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE racists. Black people know it. White people know it. And only white people are allowed to notice and pronounce the truth of it. Which would be fine. Except that white people are not a community but a political party. They can squabble

with each other in caucus but they absolutely refuse to speak the truth in public. And this is the single biggest obstacle to healing the racial divide in this country.

As it works beautiful both ways.

This is the battle. It's never gone away, and it never will, not of its own accord. We're going to have to fight it now as we've fought it before. In my opinion, Obama is fighting it the correct way, just as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X did before him -- head on, and without compromise. We shouldn't criticize his tactics, we should stand up for them, and for him, and for every other person of color in this country.

The South, and what it represents at its worst, lost the first Civil War, and has lost every one since. It will lose this one as well, but only if we refuse to blink. I'm not interested in who this punk thinks is a nigger; I am interested -- very interested -- in seeing him and his allies driven back under the rock they've crawled out from under, and to make them think twice before trying to show their faces again. Electing Obama president would be a good start.

gets a remarkably bad rap. (Yes, I know Instapunk is a bigot and we shouldn't take anything he says seriously, but still...)

Iverson has been well-behaved, hard-working, soft-spoken, gracious and thoughtful in the press, for years now. Plus he leaves his heart out on the court every single night.

What must have gone wrong in a person's development for them to witness such complex and striving humanity as Iverson's and reduce it to "nigger"?

Yes, I wish there didn't have to be so much politically correct bullying in our public life -- but it seems there has to be to maintain any semblance of public decency. There is still so much racism in this country. America's original sin is a long way from being healed.

By the way, Chris Rock regrets his "nigger" bit quite profoundly now, seeing as how it's been abused over and over by dumb white people who fancy themselves cultural critics.

As a black man it amazes me how white people just don't get this sort of thing, how amazed and outraged they are by attitudes I see every day, attitudes that are so ingrained in people they don't know they have them themselves, would recoil in horror -- and anger -- if I pointed them out.

Powerful post.

People have a walk-in-closet full of unexamined prejudice, bias, bigotry and so forth.

Some of us try to empty the closet while others are always looking for an opportunity to add new garments.

You know, I see the kind of thing Instapunk and Nazdagg write, and I am always amazed. You know, 300 years of oppression, 50 years of half-hearted reforms that haven't done much to rectify even the most recent damaging discrimination...and the only dialog on race these folks want to have is yelling about the part of the black community that they don't much like. And, usually, complaints that they're not allowed to be sufficiently racist in public.

I too see the long-ass shirts, baggy drawers, bizarre plastic-box-lookin sneakers every day. For some reason it doesn't irritate me as much (the volume-up-to-distortion level bass thumping does send me round the bend, but then I listen to Johnny Thunders at top volume, so I can't talk). Perhaps because I also see tattoos, piercings, mohawks, pink and blue and green-streaked hair, the inevitable black clothing...and I don't then go off and talk about how white people are so irresponsible, and some white people's criminal behavior, and how *we need to talk about that.*

We need dialogue, indeed, and one of the things we need to do is call out the other white people in the room when they spew racist garbage--instead any discussion about dealing with the fallout of that 300 years of oppression and still-daily discrimination.

It may be a social construct. Genetics is smashing many old concepts. You should read up on it first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28classification_of_human_beings%29

We all descended from a common ancestor in Africa and are related to other primates.

Bonobos and Chimpanzees

Put bluntly, bonobos are nice because the environment they live in is nice

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19225801.900-why-bonobos-make-love-not-war.html