Recently in Race relations Category

Upon hearing there would be new editions of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" substituting the N-word with "slave," I quickly became a 15-year-old again. I was back in that cramped classroom, one of three black students, uncomfortably listening to students of other races read "Huck Finn" aloud.

Granted, the teacher took the right precautions: a pre-lecture on inappropriate use of the N-word, a separate conversation with the black students asking how they felt about the rest of the class using the term and a no-questions-asked option for all students to skip over the word during recitation. Still, I remember it being a few incredibly uncomfortable weeks of my secondary school experience.

Though I can remember being offended by the students who used the word more brazenly than I liked or the stares by students wanting to catch my reaction to use of the word, I now laugh off the memory as a growing pain, something me and many friends have commiserated about.

The reality is, Twain aimed to bring the language, attitude and actions of the people of a certain time to life through his literature. If read in the right context, with appropriate teaching methods, "Huck Finn" becomes both a historical and social learning experience. To erase the N-word from the text is to say it didn't exist in history. Doing so would be a disservice to our youth.

To dismiss or lessen the issue of race as it pertains to the Tea Party is to neglect a major characteristic of this rogue movement that has so embittered the nation's political and social landscape. While speaking in absolutes on almost any issue is ludicrous - a concept Tea Partiers seem to have missed since its 2009 inception - Tea Partiers, whether respectable conservatives with reasonable ideas or not, have awakened members of hate organizations who find comfort in the unabashedly extreme rhetoric of the group.

The Tea Party may have emerged out of dissatisfaction with health care reform and massive bailouts but without a leader or any concrete ideas (you want tax cuts and smaller government but where's the plan to achieve that?), it is not a movement. Rather, it's a radical group of individuals who have so irresponsibly distributed a message that its supporters are allowed to interpret it as they see fit.

CBS News/New York Times' 2010 poll "The Tea Party Movement: What They Think" revealed 89 percent of Tea Party supporters identify as white and 52 percent think too much is made of the problems facing African-Americans. It's these features and ideologies of the Tea P arty that create a perfect environment for hate groups to listen to messages of frustration and translate them in to ones of hate.

TV personality and conservative Glenn Beck, who is highly regarded by Tea Partiers, once said in response to President Obama commending the AFC-CIO, "Did I slip through a wormhole in the middle of the night and this looks like America? It's like the damn 'Planet of the Apes.'" Some may say the obvious and simple reaction to this comment is to declare it racist. However, it's important to recognize that the majority of the population does compute things in their simplest terms and cultural meanings. These moments provide a perfect opportunity for the spread of hate.

Carl Paladino, a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for New York State governor, also hit nerves and strengthened stereotypes long-held in hate organizations with his "Dignity Corps" proposal, which would require those on welfare or unemployed to attend "welfare camps" to receive job training and learn personal hygiene.

Though the Tea Party's glare reaches minority groups, the elite and big government alike, we cannot dilute race from the discussion simply because it is too easy an explanation. To do so would be a fallacy.

For many years I took the position that a society was best served by a government that allowed anything and a culture that encouraged the right thing. Only this, I thought, would produce the right incentive to do the right thing.

Rand Paul attempts to bring this approach, condemning racism while saying it's not his place to ban a business from practicing it. It is intellectually defensible.

The rub is that we all know that, if we let people do things we don't want them to do, they'll probably do them no matter how much we cry. That's why so many conservative evangelicals, who claim in theory to want small, non-meddling government, in practice are on crusades to ban abortion pills, gay marriage and so on. They know that they'll never control the culture enough to squelch such behaviors -- and even if they did, those behaviors would go on anyway.

Cigarette smoking is on the decline in California, but not because of the social pressure, but because the various bans and the pressure together affected behavior. It might be coercive, but it kinda works.

Yet in the South, a century and a half of forced freedom for the black man still hasn't resulted in the vast majority of white people becoming color blind. Imagine how bad they'd be, then, if government hadn't meddled.

That's the problem with libertarian ideals. A democratic citizenry steps back and lets its social groups and institutions do what they want -- and eventually the democratic citizenry has to get involved.

That's when those social groups and institutions start claiming that the democratic citizenry is a fascist or totalitarian state. It's all a little too convenient, isn't it....?

Gail, Jonathan and Earl, I'll hereby join the profiling fray. I'll take a typically independent position -- from both liberals who decry what they see as racism within efforts to keep our streets and our shores secure, and from hard-bitten conservatives who believe liberals need to lighten up.

On the one hand, I may tip slightly closer to the conservative position. And I'll begin with an observation about dust specks in the eye and logs in the eye: Racism and xenophobia strike me as universal quirks of human nature. Downtrodden minorities are as susceptible to them as The Man is. The evolution of the tribal man and woman has wired us to, um, profile carefully anyone who may represent a rival tribe, and our best intentions don't often overcome this tendency.

Let he who is without bigotry cast the first condemnation of bigotry. Hmm, I hear crickets, but I also hear some quiet grumbling and muttering in the background. Still, I think that it's best to handle the insults of life with some grace, rather than to picket every real and perceived insult against a member of our so-called group. I wish that the members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, for instance, would be as committed to helping victims of the jihadist distortions of their faith as they are to condemning any profiling that may come as an inevitable consequence of the actions of these jihadists.

Now let me offer the "on the other hand": After I once wrote that Pakistani-Americans like me should steel ourselves for some profiling as a political necessity, and that we should handle it with good humor, I got put through the profiling wood-chipper on a trip to Israel. Five hours of tension, isolation and interrogation in the Ben-Gurion airport. It rattled me and made me feel like an unwelcome cockroach. Local police later asked me to forgive what they said was a necessary investigation. I could forgive it, but I also felt there are other places I'll spend my vacation dollar in the future. My views of profiling turned out to be easier to preach than to practice. I don't want to be in a place where they don't believe I belong.

In the end, I think stuff happens and profiling happens. I'd love to see the liberals complain less about other people's bigotry, and I'd like to see the conservatives be less audacious about minimizing the effect profiling has on the recipient.

Okay, I'm out of hands.

I'm darker than thou. I don't know you, but that's based on the demographic odds. I'm also shorter than thou, assuming you're male -- again, based on the odds. Science says there are biases involved in such matters. I'm a victim of Mother Nature, and I intend to sue her pants off.

But I don't have much to complain about with Senator Reid, or even Joe Biden, who Jonathan says is a bigger problem than Dirty Harry. We're still learning what it means to be human, we're still learning what is truly inexorable in human nature and what is cultural. As a minority, I'm keenly aware of the peculiar tendency of Pakistanis and others to cherish lighter skin within their groups. And I'm not naive about how my political prospects in America would be helped by my dressing and speaking like a "regular American" than if I wore traditional Pakistani garb and spoke with a thick accent. What's the surprise here?

I want to see more grace toward those who put their foot in their mouth -- not just the Harry Reids of the world but even the Rush Limbaughs and Michael Savages of the world, who skate on dangerous racial ice for the sake of demagoguery and ratings. If we're all slouching toward enlightenment, we can't be so quick to crush those who may appear to be lagging behind.

As one of Gail's "two readers," I find her perceptions of Muslims to be very troubling in this post. No doubt the larger Muslim world has serious issues to work through. I can agree with people ranging from the conservative Bernard Lewis to the liberal Reza Aslan on this. But Gail goes as far as to take Nonia Darwish seriously in the contention that the Muslim world is actively attempting to, uh, infiltrate the West.

To a degree, every proselytizing religion intends to infiltrate the rest of the world. That's the definition of proselytizing. Gail, don't imagine that your evangelical pro-Israel allies don't want the empty churches in Tel Aviv to someday be filled with persons like yourself.

Nonie Darwish reminds me of the former nun, Karen Armstrong, who's become a vocal critic of Christianity and a strong apologist for Muslims. Armstrong criticizes the Judeo-Christian tradition for being too mean to idolaters, but passes over Muslims' intense anti-idolatry. She claims that Christians have sexual hang-ups and that Muslims don't, which seems a stretch. She claims that Islam is more inherently forgiving than Christianity.

Mostly, she seems to be an angry child still railing about the injustices of Daddy. So does Nonie Darwish. Do you really believe Darwish is brave? She's an opportunist, refusing to grow up, because attention and money incentivize her continued immaturity. Both Armstrong and Darwish serve the interests of demagogues who like stirring up action against whole civilizations, by claiming, "But they started it."

I'm touched by Gail-Tz's story about Michael Weisser and Larry Tripp, and I believe it's essential to counter the Furrows of the world.

There is an incredible amount of hatred today in the air, born of the excruciating economic and societal uncertainties of our times, and I don't think we make much headway by shaming those who think and talk and act shamefully.

Sometimes we get pulled into pointless but vicious debates about "which side" is more guilty of hate, and why we're justified in, well, hating those whom we believe hate us even more. It not only derails our efforts to become better as individuals and as a society, it accelerates us down a cliff.

The Weisser way is, with apologies for punnery, the wiser way.

I'm not going to characterize the birthers movement as racism per se. A few generations ago, their tactics could have been used to marginalize white Catholics. So while the issue isn't explicitly racial, it's decidedly a matter of xenophobia and old-fashioned prejudice.

I was proved quite wrong when I told friends last summer, "There's no chance in hell that the nation that elected George Bush twice [and yes, I do believe he was elected twice] will put a man named Barak Hussein Obama in the White House."

Indeed, McCain ran a close "race" with Obama till the meltdown convinced enough Americans that it was willing to elect as their leader a guy whose name rhymes with Osama.

Birthers say their concerns are simply procedural and constitutional, and yet oddballs such as Orly Taitz of Orange County misread our Constitution in concocting imaginary procedures. Still, I'm deeply disturbed by the image of the YouTube video Gail-Tz refers to, of the angry Delaware woman (and angrier mob) demanding her country back.

Neurologists tell us that our brain logic is driven inexorably and almost totally by emotions. Primal negative emotions, including xenophobic ones, are inextricably part of human evolution, and they lead to a quite deadly (but perfectly reasonable) logic. That's the reason America's emotional biases against words like "Hussein" worry me just as much as any specific racial bias.

I don't agree with Earl that Obama needed not apologize or clarify his comments from Wednesday's press conference.

I look at the snippiness of Gates and Obama as reflecting a lingering touchiness on the part of blacks about racial profiling. It led Obama to, in the heat of a moment, say the wrong about Cambridge police acting "stupidly" -- but he did the right thing in retracting those words and in calling up Crawley.

I understand the snippiness, but I appreciate the clarity and sobriety that came after Obama slept on it.

PS -- Can we just say now that the proposed beer among the three parties will be a circus that will distract all of us from real issues, just as Obama's original comment distracted us from what he talked about for 57 prior minutes?

Shephard Smith worries that anti-Obama violence is in the air, here in a clip from Fox. This won't be popular with those who feel that Obama's administration is planning on rounding them up for daring to oppose mandatory abortions. But Frank Rich argues that, just as it took McCain's best efforts to calm down the people calling the eventual US president a treacherous terrorist, the GOP's leaders must calm down the people who are signaling their intention to "put an end to the false prophet Obama." Camille Paglia, herself a critic of Obama, shares some concerns about the threats against him here.