Race Relations Blog

A few short months ago, the three most viable presidential candidates were a black man, a white woman, and a white man. Now there's a 50/50 chance that the United States is about to elect its first non-white president less than three months, and rumors are swirling that even the white Republican guy is seriously considering a female running mate.

So, taking all of this into account, what do you think the race and gender makeup of the four presidential debate moderators will be?

• One white man, one man of color, one white woman, and one woman of color?
• Three white men, and one woman of color? Or maybe...
• Three white men and one white woman?

No such luck. As RaceWire's Jonathan Adams observes, the four presidential debate moderators will be four white men--a step down from the presidential debates conducted 20 years ago, where Bernard Shaw moderated what would turn out to be the most famous of the Bush-Dukakis debates. What does it say about the media when the presidential debate moderators are less diverse than the presidential candidates themselves? And as Adams asks...

If these are the picks for the presidential debates, what do think the short list looks like for Tim Russert’s job on Meet the Press?

Indeed. And taking the whiteness and maleness of the media into account, the bizarre, idiotic, and divisive coverage of the Democratic presidential primary--"race versus gender," the pundits screamed--becomes much easier to explain.

(Posted by Tom Head, About.com: Civil Liberties)

by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil LibertiesThis Flickr photo brings to mind a good analogy for racism: grocery store eggs.

Originally, the vast majority of grocery eggs were brown. But over time, chickens were bred to produce lighter and lighter eggs until eventually, they produced the white eggs that most people purchase today. The theory behind this was that white eggs looked cleaner.

While all this has happened, another change has taken place in the egg industry: mass production. Most eggs are now laid by battery hens who spend very short nine-month lives in cages too small for them to turn around in. They eat and defecate in the same place. They don't eat the sort of free range minerals that chickens ordinarily eat. Their immune systems are shot.

Most of the eggs sold today are actually much dirtier than the brown eggs that people used to eat, and created in circumstances that reflect greater cruelty. But most of them are also white, reflecting a longstanding preference for "clean"-looking eggshells.

Racism is a lot like that. There was a time when race probably mattered less than it does now. Early Egyptian art portrays differences between races but no clear hierarchy, and the association between dark-skinned people and slave labor was not clearly made until the trans-Saharan slave trade began in the 7th century AD.

But beginning at or near that point, our class system was color-coded to race. Over the centuries, hundreds of millions of sub-Saharan African emigrants who in many instances would have made great physicians, scientists, and policymakers were denied education and forced into lives of slave labor, while hundreds of millions of whites who in many instances would have been happier with manual labor were educated and groomed into roles that they didn't want and couldn't adequately fill. People were denied choices, denied flexibility, denied social mobility--setting the human race back as a result.

We have ended up with white eggs, mass-produced and genetically engineered to look "clean," that are actually far dirtier than the farm-produced brown eggs that preceded them. And we have ended up with white people, traditionally classified at the top of the Western caste hierarchy, dominating a world that many among them are underqualified to lead.

As long as the racist caste hierarchy defines our culture, we are in effect judging the cleanliness of our eggs by the color of their shells--with results that can be far deadlier than salmonella.

Related: Institutional Racism

by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties

Some people are just beyond reproach when it comes to racially inflammatory statements, remarks, or actions. Or, at least, they think they should be.

A.J. Plaid sees last week's controversial New Yorker cover as a good example of what Carmen Van Kerckhove calls "hipster racism," defined as:

... ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning "ironic" nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the behavior necessarily has to be meant to denigrate another person's race or ethnicity, but there are definitely solid examples of hipster racism out there.

One example that immediately comes to mind would be the illustrations selected for Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There, published by Seal Press, which used as its motif racist sketches from vintage comic books of white men and women doing battle with caricatures of black African tribesmen. Marcotte, who did not select the illustrations, offered a sincere apology; Seal Press, which did select the illustrations, offered an apology of the I'm-sorry-you-were-offended variety. The apology and stated rationale behind the illustrations seem very, well, hipster:

We apologize for any pain or concern these images have caused ...

We do not believe it is appropriate for a book about feminism, albeit a book of humor, to have any images or illustrations that are offensive to anyone.

Please know that neither the cover, nor the interior images, were meant to make any serious statement. We were hoping for a campy, retro package to complement the author's humor. That is all. We were not thinking ...

This 1950s Marvel comic is not an accurate reflection of our beauty standards, our beliefs regarding one's right to bear arms, nor our perspectives on race relations, foreign policy, or environmental policy.

Seal Press had, a few weeks prior, answered criticisms from bloggers of color by explaining that "you all engage best through negative discourse." But these Seal Press editors are people who do good activism on civil rights issues, whose views on race seem to be very 21st-century in other respects. What's the deal? Good question. No clear answers, though.

Likewise, as a former active member of Integrity--a group dedicated to working or the full inclusion of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender persons in the Episcopal Church--I was horrified when the president of the organization included an illustration depicting apes in episcopal vestments as part of a blog entry criticizing African archbishops. The only people who criticized the illustration seemed to be conservatives, who had their own reasons to do so.

And I have noticed a remarkable silence regarding a recent Rolling Stone illustration depicting McCain being tortured by jarring anti-Asian caricatures of Obama, Clinton, and Bush.

There seems to be a popularly held view that if you have non-white friends, come from a certain income class, and have the right political opinions, it just isn't necessary to worry about doing racist things. But the truth is that racist behavior isn't limited to stereotypically "racist" people; "good" people can make the same mistakes, and need to own up to it when they do.

I have no real opinion on the New Yorker cover. I think functionally the racist imagery can only be seen as satirical, but I also think that an illustration that relies on racist imagery, even when used in a satirical context, is not a brilliant thing to put on the cover of a major national magazine.

What do you think? Share your thoughts below.

Jack Kerwick has written another op-ed dealing with the issue of racism (I took issue with one of his previous articles here). Money quote:

Yet it is a mystery how Obama’s "deep and abiding love for this country" is reconciled with his 20-plus years as a member of a Black Nationalist church saturated with anti-white and anti-American ideologies. Wright, Obama’s spiritual mentor, is a "black liberation theologian," which teaches that the liberation of oppressed non-white people will only be achieved once "white supremacy" is destroyed. Consequently, love for America -- which promotes freedom of speech and expression -- is simply not an emotion black liberationists can be expected to feel. This is the ideology to which Obama has been exposed for more than half his life.

Without singling Jack out (because his errors are remarkably common errors), this paragraph demands a rebuttal.

First, Trinity United Church of Christ is not, strictly speaking, a black nationalist church. Black nationalism preaches that African Americans should either establish a separate black nation (the rationale behind the establishment of Liberia), or conquer the United States and expel non-blacks by force (which even Louis Farrakhan doesn't advocate). Nobody at Trinity United Church of Christ has spoken in support of either doctrine, so it would be inaccurate to describe TUCC as a "black nationalist" church. If TUCC were in fact a black nationalist church, it would be one of the most remarkably uncommitted black nationalist churches in history--welcoming white members, inviting white speakers, and belonging, as it does, to a predominantly white denomination.

Second, white supremacy should be destroyed. White supremacy refers to the disproportionate power that institutional racism gives whites over people identified with other racial groups. People who think white supremacy is a good thing are called white supremacists. People who don't think white supremacy is a good thing are obligated to destroy it. There is no intellectually honest middle ground on this point.

Third, black liberation theology can be accurately defined as a theology that is centered on the liberation of black people. That's all there is to it. Any predominantly black inner-city church that does not preach, welcome, or accommodate any form of black liberation theology is, more likely than not, inadequately serving its parishioners.

I don't know where Jack Kerwick got the idea that black liberation theology is in any way incompatible with a belief in free speech or freedom of expression, but I'm reasonably sure it wasn't by reading black liberation theologians.

The issue of whether the Rev. Wright, a retired Marine and Vietnam War veteran, is "anti-American" because he sometimes gets angry at the country to which he has dedicated his life is of course another issue. For my part, my only disagreement with Barack Obama over Trinity United Church of Christ is that I think he was too eager to distance himself from it. As far as I'm concerned, America could use more patriots like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Related: Barack Obama's Speech on Patriotism

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Juneteenth celebration (Richmond, California). Photo: David Paul Morris / Getty Images.

TheRoot.com's John McWhorter, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, asks: Why celebrate Juneteeth? Excerpt:

Slaves, upon release, generally led lives of miserable sharecropping and other menial labor, and their descendants, as often as not, migrated north to end up penned into segregated slums ...

To me, the real day of celebration—one that I always think about as it passes—is not June 19 but July 2. That was the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed. The Civil Rights Act had as profound an impact on the fate of blacks in the United States as Emancipation. Say what you want about how far we have to go, but the official dismantling of Jim Crow was a watershed event in the history of human affairs.

In the years leading up to the American Civil War, Northern abolitionists disagreed about what the best approach to ending slavery would be. Most favored instant Emancipation, in which all slaves would be granted citizenship simultaneously. But some favored gradual Emancipation--a policy that would set a date in advance for the emancipation of all slaves, and give slaveowners time to adjust financially to the new reality. The war rendered the question moot, and instant Emancipation won out. In theory.

But the reality of the situation is that, as McWhorter points out, free Southern blacks for the most part weren't discernibly better off than Southern slaves. Jim Crow laws, such as the Mississippi Black Codes, made sure that Southern blacks of the era stayed poor and lacked political influence. After pretending to protect Southern blacks for less than a decade, the federal government left Southern blacks to the Dixiecrat wolves in 1877 and failed to do its job for another 87 years. To this day, racial profiling, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, hate crimes, cyclical poverty, and other vestiges of the old racial caste system remain.

Sure, some blacks benefitted from instant Emancipation. But some blacks were free prior to Emancipation, too, and that didn't eliminate the reality of slavery. If we separate ourselves from the labels we use to describe policies and look at the realities of human experience, there isn't much difference between a slave and an indentured sharecropper. And if we separate ourselves from the labels we use to describe policies and look at the realities of human experience, there is an undeniable family resemblance difference between someone being born to a life in a slave's chains and someone being inculturated into a life in the chains of prison and poverty. We may have a black president next January, but it is a safe bet that this will not change the hard realities of life--that black Americans are three times as likely as whites to live in poverty, that black Americans are far more likely to go to prison or become victims of crime, that we still live in a culture that has judged the next generation of black Americans guilty before they have even been born.

Opportunities have increased over the past 143 years, and Emancipation and the Civil Rights Act certainly represent milestones in that process, but the Emancipation the abolitionists had in mind--a true and universal Emancipation, an Emancipation that, in the words of William Lloyd Garrison, "includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights"--still hasn't happened for many black Americans living today.

So while I wouldn't go as far as to dismiss Juneteenth, I always have to resist the urge to put an asterisk on the word "Emancipation." There is a ghost of Juneteenth past, a ghost of Juneteenth present, and a ghost of Juneteenth future. There is a greater Emancipation, a universal Emancipation, that awaits us still.

See also:

• The Conscience of the King
• Black Civil Rights in America: An Illustrated History

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Although New York magazine cites Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan as an example of the "brownface" phenomenon, both Sandler and the title character are ethnically Jewish. Photo: Rob Loud / Getty Images

The other night I caught a few minutes of The Dragon Painter (1919), an American film starring the husband-wife team of Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki. One of the remarkable things about Hayakawa and Aoki was that until the past few decades, it was virtually unheard of for an Asian character to actually be played by an actor of Asian ancestry in an American film. More often the character would be played by a caucasian actor wearing crude makeup--as in the case of the Swedish-American actor Warner Oland, who played Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu in the famous 1920s serials.

Have we come a long way? Not necessarily, as New York magazine reports (see "The Summer of Brownface"). Excerpt:

... [I]n You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, opening tomorrow ... Adam Sandler plays an Israeli and Rob Schneider an Arab; both have seemingly taken a dip in the same substance used to honey up Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart. Mike Myers’s The Love Guru is quite possibly the first Hollywood comedy entirely devoted to tittering over turbans since Peter Sellers played Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party, from 1968. Ben Kingsley, naturally, shows up to meta-travesty his own half-Indian heritage, and by extension his Gandhi role, with a cameo as Guru Tugginmypudha. (Should the homophonic hilarity of that name prove too subtle, there’s also Guru Satchabigknoba.)

Kingsley is also onboard for the just-announced Prince of Persia, the cast of which — unveiled in the past week — includes such notable Persians as Jake Gyllenhaal and Alfred Molina. Nor is the trend limited to Hollywood blockbusters. In the indie thriller Stuck, out now, ethnic Estonian Mena Suvari rocks the cornrows to play a character based on a real-life black woman. On the small screen, meanwhile, it’s a fairly safe bet that the two-month overlap between the general-election and the TV-production cycles will bring us a lot more Fred Armisen as Barack Obama come September.

And none of the above, of course, is even close in sheer audacity (and, let’s admit it, comic potential) to Robert Downey Jr.’s full-blown blackface in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder.

I'm not the arbiter of what is and isn't offensive, but it seems to me that brownface, or blackface, is problematic when it does one of two things:

• When it reduces the already scandalously limited number of roles available to people of color, and/or
• When it reinforces harmful stereotypes.

If we look at each of these examples based on those standards, we find that not all "brownface" is created equal. Read more...

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Photo: Lawrence Lucier / Getty Images

Last Friday, Geraldine Ferraro answered exit poll data suggesting that racial resentment was a factor in several key Clinton victories (see "Did Racism Win West Virginia, Kentucky for Clinton?") by suggesting that racial resentment is not necessarily racist, and that it may be justified.

Yes, she really did write that. Excerpt (emphasis mine):

Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don't believe he understands them and their problems. That when he said in South Carolina after his victory "Our Time Has Come" they believe he is telling them that their time has passed.

I don't mean to focus on Ferraro. Her remarks in March, in which she essentially described Barack Obama as a quota hire, were offensive but should not have surprised us, considering her history of making similar remarks in the past. I'm also not interested in discussing the Clinton campaign's own history on race issues, since I've already discussed this at length (see "Hillary Clinton vs. The Black Candidate"). I'm more interested in the logic of Ferraro's views on racial resentment, which are shared (I suspect) by many whites.

First, the term "racial resentment" does have a history that precedes Ferraro and the Racial Resentment Index used by Newsweek to assess the role of race in the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries. And most political scientists could have predicted that it would be a factor in the campaign of the first African-American presidential candidate. As a team of seven authors wrote in Whitewashing Race (University of California Press, 2003, p. 210):

Racially polarized voting is due in part to white voters' fear and mistrust of black candidates. In an imaginative study, Keith Reeves showed that despite white voters' reluctance to reveal their racial prejudices to pollsters, their views of blacks are directly linked to their feelings about black candidates. In an experimental survey Reeves devised, he presented white voters with descriptions of two candidates who differed only in their positions regarding two issues, environmental policy and affirmative action. For one group of white voters, both candidates were white; for the other group, one candidate was black. When faced with the black candidate, whom Reeves called Hammond, many whites changed their vote to the undecided category rather than saying they would vote against the black candidate. Reeves showed that these voters were quite hostile to blacks and expressed common negative racial stereotypes ...

Racially polarized elections persist for two reasons. The most obvious one is that white candidates often play the race card. Reeves's study, as well as other data, shows that simply identifying an opponent as black easily sways white voters, as will racially coded campaign appeals to stir up racial resentment among white voters.

Racial resentment has historically been understood as a bad thing--reflecting white disaffection with civil rights programs and the slowly diminishing opportunity gap between whites and people of color. The sense many whites have is that resources are finite, if not scarce, and that any gains made by people of color will negatively affect the livelihoods of whites. For voters who feel that Hillary Clinton is more qualified, the victories of the younger Barack Obama might feel like affirmative action at work. White Democrats who might never have voted for Hillary Clinton before the campaign, but harbor a high level of racial resentment, might see themselves in her. They might wonder why the younger, allegedly less qualified black candidate is getting a position that had been previously all but reserved for an older, allegedly more qualified white candidate.

It's no surprise, from this vantage point, that some of these white Democrats--many of whom generally vote Republican in national elections--might turn to John McCain. Like Hillary Clinton, he's older and he's white.

But is this really racism? That depends on how you define racism. If you define racism as a philosophical belief in the biological superiority of whites, then no, it probably wouldn't qualify as racism. But that has seldom been anything more than a fig leaf for the practical concerns of racial resentment--the attempt by insular whites to make sure that they were able to claim resources and opportunities for their families and their communities at the expense of other families and other communities. Racist policy may be motivated by pseudoscientific race theory, but simple greed is enough--especially in impoverished regions such as the South and Appalachia, where resources are scarce. And any time there is de facto racial segregation in regions where resources are scarce, there is likely to be some degree of racial resentment.

Ferraro takes the view that one of Obama's primary goals over the next six months should be to somehow appeal to these racial resentment voters:

Hope, change, and inspiration don't do it. A speech on racism might persuade editorial boards, but to these voters it's "just words." Obama has less than six months to make the case.

The implicit message of Ferraro's editorial is that Hillary Clinton wouldn't have to make such a case in the general election, but historical evidence strongly suggests that she would. As political historians Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W. Daynes write (Moral Controversies in American Politics: Cases in Social Regulatory Policy, p. 64):

Affirmative action has been used by Republicans for three decades to try to splinter the Democratic base of women, minorities, and working-class white males. The Nixon administration sought to pit white workers against black recipients of affirmative action, and peel off the angry white males from the Democratic Party and encourage them to vote Republican. The strategy was successful in the 1972 presidential election, and much more so in appealing to the "Reagan Democrats." By the 1980s Republicans could run against the programs they had created in order to appeal to the white working class.

This is not to say that McCain would use white racial resentment as a campaign strategy--he may, in fact, take this opportunity to choose a non-white running mate and guarantee that the next White House will be racially diverse--but Ferraro's suggestion that the Democratic nominee find some way to overcome certain voters' racial resentment seems ill advised. White Democratic nominees have been trying to do that, unsuccessfully, for decades; expecting Barack Obama, or even Hillary Clinton, to somehow pull it off seems unrealistic.

See also:

• Racism and Electability

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Photo: Scott Olson / Getty Images

The Summer Olympics are still months away, but sports fans can still sit back and watch the Oppression Olympics unfold on their TV screens. White male pundits still debate whether misogyny is worse than racism or racism is worse than misogyny, but nobody seems to ask this question of women of color who actually ran for political office, among whom the verdict seems to be mixed. When Shirley Chisholm ran for president in 1972, she remarked that "I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black." But when Barbara Blackmon lost her bid to become Mississippi's lieutenant governor in 2003, she attributed the loss to race, not gender. Most women of color who have spoken to me about this are more annoyed at the question itself than they are at the potential that someone might get the wrong answer.

So I'd like to say, right off the bat, that I'm not interested in making the argument that race trumps gender. Nothing "trumps" gender or race. We'll be living in a much better world when something does, but right now both race and gender remain fundamentally untrumped, to the detriment of us all. (Let's not forget another Shirley Chisholm quote: "In the end, antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: antihumanism.") And while Democrats tear each other apart over the race vs. gender question, Republicans have already selected a white male nominee who has 50/50 odds of becoming the 44th president and rendering this entire discussion moot.

But putting aside the question of race versus gender for a moment, I think opposition to the Clinton and Obama campaigns provides us with a rare example to study how race and gender can factor into a political campaign. About.com: Women's Issues guide Linda Lowen has done a fine job during this campaign of looking at how misogyny has impacted Hillary Clinton's bid (see "It's About Gender, Stupid"); I think it's also important to look at how racism has impacted Obama's.

There is no better petri dish to analyze that question than the West Virginia and Kentucky exit polls. These two states, which Hillary Clinton won by overwhelming margins, are states in which white racism played a significant and potentially pivotal role in the outcome. That's not speculation on my part; the voters said it played a significant and potentially pivotal role in the outcome.

Let's look at the West Virginia exit poll, in which 16% of white voters (more than 95% of primary voters were white) reported that race was a factor in their decision to vote for Hillary Clinton. Clinton won with 67% of the vote. If we take the 16% at their word, all but 1% of Clinton's margin of victory can be attributed to white voters who admit that they were less likely to vote for Obama on account of his race.

In Kentucky, as Pam Spaulding reports, the situation was even more bleak. Some 18% of white voters (99% of Kentucky voters were white) reported that race was a factor in their decision to vote for Hillary Clinton. Clinton won Kentucky with 65%. Without the 18% of voters who admit that race was a factor in their decision to vote for her, she would have received only 47% of the vote.

Clinton supporters who boast of her impressive numbers in Kentucky and West Virginia, in contrast with her steady losses in other recent states, need to acknowledge the clear and documented role that racism played in those two victories. This is not to say, of course, that misogyny has not likewise played a role in Barack Obama's victories. But when Hillary Clinton touts her support from "hardworking whites," or her husband compares Obama to Jesse Jackson, or her finance chair suggests that he's a presidential quota hire, or her polling expert suggests that he won't carry the Latino vote, and so on and so forth, that lends credence to the idea that racism is actually a strategy in her campaign and not merely a side effect of the fact that she's running against a black candidate. Both Clinton and Obama could probably do more to repudiate bigots who would be inclined to support them, but Clinton, due to the rhetoric that her own campaign has used, has a much more difficult task ahead of her if she intends to leave this contest with her legacy intact.

See also:

• Hillary Clinton vs. The Black Candidate

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Jack Kerwick, guest columnist for the new About.com: U.S. Conservative Politics site, is about half right. He's not crazy about the word "racism," and thinks that anyone interested in having a multiracial discussion about race issues should declare a moratorium on the word first. His article reflects the ambiguity that many whites feel about the word "racism," an ambiguity that some people of color share, and an ambiguity that rests partly in the fact that race itself is a nonsense idea and it's very hard to create a really useful vocabulary around a nonsense idea. Race is a vehicle for oppression, a pseudoscientific way of color-coding caste bias to benefit the glorified con artists who invented it, and the terminology we use to talk about race now will probably sound ridiculous in 500 years. Race itself is racist. The fact that race exists at all, in any significant way, is a pretty good indicator that we live in a racist culture--because any non-racist culture would have little use for such a vague, clumsy, and culturally loaded taxonomy of family and cultural heritage.

In lesbian and gay rights activism, there are two wonderful words to refer, separately, to anti-gay motivation, also known as homophobia, and anti-gay systems or behavior, also known as heterosexism. You can do heterosexist things without homophobic motives, like eHarmony does--matching only opposite-sex couples because those are the only kinds of relationships that their matchmaking formula has been written to address. You can also do anti-heterosexist things with homophobic motives, such as supporting a local lesbian and gay matchmaking service because you have an irrational fear that your neighbor is coming on to you and you want to throw him off your scent.

But racism and sexism, as terms, don't really work that way. You can do racist or sexist things with no intention of doing so, or you can have private racist or sexist motivations. This double-sided aspect of racism is one that many whites, including but certainly not limited to white conservatives, can't get their heads around. Racist behavior, in the eyes of some whites, is behavior that is motivated by intentional racism--say, a philosophical belief in white supremacy. It makes sense that whites would see racism this way, since if you're a white person trying not to do racist things, not having a racist ideology is a good first step.

People of color tend to experience, and therefore define, racism a little bit differently. Whites who specifically and deliberately and openly buy into a philosophy of white supremacy are a pain but they aren't usually the biggest problem, because they don't tend to have much power these days. But institutional racism has a lot of power, often putting white kids in better schools and more economically stable families and one day into better career tracks with a higher annual salary, leading towards a retirement and a higher life expectancy to match. That reality is much more oppressively racist than some lunatic on the street corner ranting about "children of Ham." Read more...