Race
MRH offers a short-answer essay, in the comments, on “otherness” and the reasoning behind political correctness: Rightly or wrongly (I think increasingly wrongly) the default category in American society is white, Christian, and male. Anyone who isn’t white, Christian, or male is to some degree the “other.” It’s easy, but a little dicey, for someone…
In a comment over on Ian Donnis’s blog, Jim Taricani illustrates an error of thought common among his generation: Many of my contemporaries have done a fine job of talking with political correctness about race. But too many lacked the guts to actually THINK political correctness with real conviction. Maybe, just maybe, Obama’s election represents…
Jerry Landay provides an inkling as to why the Left is so viciously anxious to destroy any successful minorities who do not carry its water: They scuttle a semantic game that otherwise allows disagreement to be portrayed as bigotry. Consider: Race determined the primary outcome in three industrial swing states. Hillary Clinton, a white, won…
We’ve been having this conversation hereabouts, and Jonathan Zimmerman puts it well: Beneath all of this talk, of course, lies the fallacy of race itself. Although America is a richly diverse place, we’re told, people in any given race are the same — or should be. That’s why you still hear whispers in the African-American…
Over at RI Future yesterday, Matt Jerzyk wrote…When the immigration debate becomes about “them” and the “them” is largely determined by race and ethnicity, then racism is a clear component of the debate.But how about the definition of “them” in other areas of public debate? In a post from just two days earlier, Paul Bovenzi…
Race’s status as an umbrella term for an amorphous category of qualities — from skin color to lifestyle choices — justify a significant degree of skepticism about claims of racial profiling. In the context of a recent University of Rhode Island investigation of state police traffic stops and searches (concerning which, I haven’t been able…
A few weeks ago, Dan Yorke brought one of his coworkers (a sports guy) into the studio to discuss his Massachusetts primary vote for Barack Obama. That coworker characterized himself as the only non-racist person he knew and sought to explain why it was appropriate to look at Obama and see only a black man…
I have a piece in today’s Christian Science Monitor about the recent resolution by the New Jersey legislature apologizing for slavery. On the one hand, such an apology is harmless. But on the other, it feeds off of the idea that the United States has been racist from the start, obscuring the fact that it…
It’s one thing for Reverend Al Sharpton to use the racial gaffes of others principally as a means of attracting a spotlight or a microphone to himself. It’s an annoyance but the ultimate impact is on the credibility of Reverend Sharpton. It’s another thing for him to do so when the gaffe involves the word…
State Republican Chairman Giovanni Cicione touched off a minor firestorm in political circles with his statement that unions are a source of institutional racism. Monday’s Political Scene column in the Projo summarized and exchange between Chairman Cicione and reporter Bill Rappleye on WJAR-TV‘s (NBC 10) 10 News Conference…State Republican Chairman Giovanni Cicione’s description of labor…