The New Republic

The Valley Swim Club case in Philadelphia is a useful demonstration of the role that racism plays in Obama’s America where we are supposedly “post-racial.” The Creative Steps Day Camp, with mostly black kids, had paid to be able swim at the club. When the kids jumped into the pool, according to what some of them say, certain white members came up with the likes of “What are all these black kids doing here? I’m scared they might do something to my child.” That quote comes from Dymore Baylor, and we will not assume he’s lying. READ MORE >>

The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the New Haven firefighters whose test results were discounted is welcome news indeed for making our discussions of race and racism clearer and more honest. It’s high time the Title VII stipulation on “disparate impact,” based on a 1971 codicil gloss on the Civil Rights Act’s banning of intentional discrimination in 1964, was revised. In itself, it makes sense--but mission creep has led to a distorted sense of what it means, or should mean. READ MORE >>

I have been telling friends for fifteen years that Michael Jackson would not live past fifty, although I didn't expect to be so precisely on the mark. An overdose, a botched medical procedure, or maybe just something as fortuitous as a car accident. That is, I sensed nothing as mundane as a death wish or as common as self-destructive tendencies. It just always seemed to me that there was something unreachably and definitively absent about the man. For all of the eclat, there seemed to be nothing actually there - surely, before long he would just blow away. READ MORE >>

According to Adam Serwer over at The Root, the NAACP's suit against Wells Fargo for deliberately trawling black neighborhoods to sell subprime mortgages "proves me wrong." READ MORE >>

In this commencement season, I myself gave the commencement address for a bunch of high school dropouts. Mind you, the school was Bard College at Simon's Rock, where students enter after tenth grade instead of twelfth, immediately beginning college work and never looking back. It would be a good thing for America if these students' experience was more ordinary--except that it would also be a good thing if there were many, many fewer college students at all. READ MORE >>

This idea that Sonia Sotomayor's line that a "wise Latina woman" has an advantage in judging over a white man is racist can be taken in two ways. One is that the people saying this are just playing politics. The other is that they are as curiously deaf to what the term racism means as they assail liberals of being, standing right alongside their bugbears such as Jeremiah Wright in slowing America's progress towards "post-racialism." READ MORE >>

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The descriptions of the housing project that Sonia Sotomayor grew up in are an important rejoinder to a truism oft-heard: that poor blacks were done in by, in addition to so many other things, architecture. READ MORE >>

The past month has witnessed assorted claims that the origin of what makes us human has been at last unearthed, identified, or deduced. That none of them live up to the claim shows how maddeningly elusive that quest is. READ MORE >>

The responses to my post on Shakespeare have been interesting, and deserve response. Despite the predictable component of, shall we say, disagreement, most seem to agree on one thing: Shakespeare's language requires, at this distance from Elizabethan times, considerable effort to process in real time during performance. READ MORE >>