Inside from the Inside

One of the challenges for me personally about writing on the subject of racism is that I am driven to bring new ideas to the discussion, to look at things from unique points of view. Given that,  I sometimes see connections that aren’t obvious to anyone else, but are perfectly obvious to me. But [...]

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Harry Allen refers to White Americans as “white supremacists.”
His logic in doing so, from my interpretation of his words, is that white people have the power in this country, thereby making them supreme, though not superior, to Blacks Americans.  And Harry, it’s always a dicey proposition to attempt to break down your carefully crafted thoughts [...]

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Being a beer lover I was pleased to hear of “The Beer Summit” being the theater where we can sing Kumbaya or not.  This divisive topic about the arrest of professor Gates can be a valuable lesson if we grab it.  What are the lessons we can learn?  This is my list.
1. Racism is still a very [...]

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Last week I wrote about Pope Benedict’s call for us to view human relations through the lens of  ”man’s transcendent dignity.”
One reader’s response:
When I consider the infinite variables that make up a person: age, race, personality, region of origin, ancestry, family size, birth order, value systems, stage of life, economic and educational experiences, relational experiences, [...]

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When Barack Obama spoke last week on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, above, the president observed that “the Cambridge Police acted stupidly.”
That quote quickly became being the one most widely reproduced, as I knew it would, eclipsing the visibility of almost anything he’d said in his preceding press conference, ostensibly [...]

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I knew she was dog meat, even though I was just an imaginative 2yr old that wintered night.
Granny’s cane approached like a heat seeking missile.
Dad Ninja’d the table while Mom shouted, “Do it, Baby!”
His feet slammed the woman’s chest as he snatched the cane centimeters from my jaw.
Dad lumberjacked her head with that cane. T-H-W-A-C-K!
It [...]

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A collection of opinions from around the web on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.
Ta-Nahesi Coates sees both class and race at play:
…for black people, this is the kind of issue that tends to cut across lines of class and politics. I would say that this is the sort of thing that angers upper middle-class [...]

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If you took Dave Chappelle, Dr. Ruth, Dr. Phil, Noam Chomsky, William Prescott and mixed them all together you would get Gustavo Arellano.  He has been labeled by some Mexicans on one end of the spectrum as a Vendido (sell out) and by others a  quintessential  intelligent articulate writer and every thing in between.

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…
In his new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict suggests we will get nowhere on human (and by extension, race) relations if the conversation does not include God.
It is only by “placing [ourselves] in relation with others and with God,” the pope writes, that we will ever understand ”man’s transcendent dignity,” and thus act with justice toward [...]

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I honestly did not expect this.
After I posted “Black Like @KirstieAlley: Twittering About Race with the Fat Actress” yesterday, I manually sent out one tweet, at 5:55 pm ET, announcing the posting. (My blog automatically sent out another one 45 minutes later.) I then left the house to take care of some business, getting back [...]

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