http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/22/83758/9895/1022/482071

The national debt, global warming, recession, America's version of the 100 year's war, veterans being discarded like throwaways, domestic spying, and a president yet to be introduced to the truth all undermine America.

The last thing America needs is a presidential campaign driven by America's all too prevalent gutter-huggers evacuating religious, sexist and racist bigotry.

every bit as much as I am sick of white people, Hispanics, Jews and Orientals. That is, I am sick of the use of meaning-free social constructs like “black” and “white” that refer to nothing that is real or that is adaptively useful.

There is no such thing as race.

That is, no such thing apart from the useful fears elicited by the utterances and symbols around “race” used by demagogues of all skin hues to divide, marginalize or gain status or power by capitalizing on the remnant evolutionary correlates of kinship and tribalism.

The empty symbols, the constructs, have allowed generations of discrimination and oppression based on differences in physical appearance, and continue to today. They are substantive only to the extent, astoundingly, that we continue to maintain them as symbols and thereby enable their power.

Every dialog on race perpetuates the meaning-free construct “race”. Get past it, stop using harmful language, it’s keeping us sick.

Do Instapunk and the Unibomber share the same cubicle?

These people are sure full of hatred. My guess is they did not get enough hugs when they were little ones. Poor them. What a waste. Bad karma. It's possible the only way they feel alive is by hating.

I appreciate your thoughts. I've been so fortunate. My kids have had many truly wonderful teachers who clearly see their job as a calling. I went into the profession with these teachers as my inspiration. I know there is room for improvement in public education, but for whatever reason, I've seldom had the negative experiences that many people report.

Best wishes to your daughter. Administration is a more thankless job than teaching. Not only must she deal with parents, but also with teachers who blame administrators for flaws in the system (I'm guilty of doing that sometimes.) And so much of the day is taken up with disciplinary issues. It can't be an easy job, and I will never attempt it.

I know there are passionate, engaged, caring, loving individuals ... but it's as if our "public face" or "public consciousness" believes we somehow "can't afford" to care ... and, equally on the other side, that those who might be needy, might have had bad luck, might have made mistakes in their lives, really, don't deserve or are insufficiently worthy ... at times this attitude extending into the immediate family, tough-love and all that ...

It's as if a terrible me-first stinginess has become the new normal ... Sure, I blame Reagan and economics and flat wages, first and foremost ... but it is as if everyone feels so overwhelmed there is no time or money or attention or even wish to do more than take care of one's own.

About ten years ago, on the street where I lived in Los Angeles, an abandoned house became a shooting gallery and prostitutes began taking their customers down our street to get there ... The police weren't very interested at all. The property owners (a corporation) weren't interested. (The property was a teardown and had been on the market for years)...

Being lassiez-faire liberal types, we tried to ignore the situation most of the time ... but what was the heartbreaker was trying to explain to the children what all these people were doing, particularly when wasted "customers" would pass out in the (cyclone fenced) yard. It was very hard to explain that there really wasn't anything we could do. That NOBODY cared ...

Is this some sort of "learned helplessness"? Is this still the country I grew up in?

One can, of course, replace Instapunk's list of "niggers" with a comparable list of fallen white ministers, politicians and celebrities -- or with members of any race, for that matter. Thus, his list might have read like this: Ted Haggard, Britney Spears, Robert Downey Jr., Duke Cunningham, David Vitter, etc.

But we don't think to group white people in this manner. When Ted Haggard uses drugs and sleeps with a prostitute, nobody thinks to suggest that it has something to do with his race. And when Duke Cunningham accepts bribes, nobody says it happened because he's white. This is, of course, the correct approach -- their problems don't, in fact, have anything to do with their race. But when a black person does something offensive, it's immediately attributed to his blackness.

This is also apparent in what is perhaps the most remarkable thing about Instapunk's list: its diversity. There are, it seems, many ways to be a nigger. A black man is a nigger if he breaks the law by using drugs (Barry) or sexually assaulting someone (Tyson); if he is a corrupt politician (Jefferson); or if he's completely law abiding, but says bad things about America (Wright, Farrakan). Consider this: Aside from the fact that they're all black men, what do Wright, Iverson, Farrakan, Barry, and Jefferson all have in common? I, for one, am unable to come up with an underlying similarity not related to their race -- just as I can't think of what Britney Spears and Duke Cunningham have in common.

But, of course, Instapunk's deeper problem with these individuals isn't in their ultimate actions, it's in the fact that they do these actions in a way that's somehow "black." Thus, when he complains of the black males that he says he sees every day, he doesn't identify a single bad activity that they engage in; they're niggers simply because of how they dress. They wear their pants around their knees, so of course he "wants to smack them" and can't help but think of the N-word.

It is this underlying fear of black men's "blackness" -- in any form and regardless of the actions associated with the individual -- that has been, and continues to be, so easily exploited by the right. As Obama pointed out in his speech, it cemented the Reagan coalition and it allowed for the Republican Southern strategy. And, it seems, it is alive and well now.