Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.

Congratulations! Your children are well on their way to believing that is better than everybody else.

Surprised? So were authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman when they started researching the issue of kids and race for their book NurtureShock. It turns out that a lot of our assumptions about raising our kids to appreciate diversity are entirely wrong.

Read More – Wired: How to Raise Racist Kids

(via Monstrrrous)

Today marks the 116th anniversary of Norman Rockwell’s birth. Born in New York, Rockwell became best known for his idealized images of small-town life. He was shunned by the art world in his time and that impression has largely continued today. A commercial illustrator for the vast majority of his life, for many Rockwell is associated only with saccharine sweetness and stagnant tradition.

This is wrong.

The other side of Norman Rockwell

More than a thousand African workers were put aboard buses and trains in the southern Italian region of Calabria over the weekend and shipped out to immigrant detention centers, following some of the country’s worst riots in years.

The clashes began Thursday night in Rosarno, a working-class city amid citrus groves in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, after a legal immigrant from Togo was lightly wounded in a pellet-gun attack in a nearby city. It is not clear who pulled the trigger — the authorities said they were investigating whether organized crime had provoked the riots — but the consequences were severe.

Blaming racism for the attack, dozens of immigrants burned cars and smashed shop windows in Rosarno in two days of riots, throwing rocks at local residents and fighting with the police. More than 50 immigrants and police officers were wounded, none seriously, and 10 immigrants and locals were arrested before the authorities began sending the immigrants to detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy on Saturday.

New York Times: Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected

(via Cryptogon)

The New York Times has an interesting interactive infographic that let’s you select your race, gender, age, and level of education and see the jobless rate for your category.

For college educated white men between 25 and 44 (like me), the jobless rate is only 3.9%. College educated black men in the same age group, it’s 8.3%.

The Jobless Rate for People Like You

(via Flowing Data, recommended by Erik in the comments of this post)

Civil rights and civil liberties groups are calling for a Louisiana justice of the peace to resign after he refused to sign a marriage license for an interracial couple in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace for the eighth ward of Tangipahoa Parish, declined to issue a license to Beth Humphrey, 30, and her boyfriend Terence McKay, 32, both of Hammond. Bardwell justified his decicion on the grounds of concern for the welfare of their children. Humphrey is white, McKay black.

Bardwell was quoted in news reports as saying that neither blacks nor whites truly accept the offspring of interracial marriages, and that such marriages usually do not last long.

Huliq: Interracial couple denied marriage license in Louisiana

(via The Agitator)

This Labor Day weekend we learned that unemployment shot up again in August, after the false hope of an artificially low rate reported for July. And we learned that 1/9 of Americans are receiving food stamps.

And, in a major victory in their apparent quest to turn all of the United States into the town from Gummo, Republicans pressured the nation’s “green jobs czar,” into resigning for not being nice enough to the people who got us into this mess.

That professional Republican propagandists can paint Jones as an uncivil and racially insensitive conspiracy theorist is a major coup for them, and that these matters are more important than the state of our ever crumbling economy is telling.

How is that with a minority in both the house and senate, having lost the presidency, and with its political leadership in disarray the Republicans are still setting the agenda and winning political battles? Why are the Democrats bending over backwards to accommodate these swine that so cynically sold the nation up the river?

The easy answer is that there isn’t really much difference between the two parties. But that answer doesn’t tell the whole story.

To say “there’s no difference between the Democrats and Republicans” is to drastically over simplify. The worst Democrats in recent history (ex: Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman) are nowhere near as bad as the worst Republicans in recent history (ex: Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond). The best Republican senators in recent history (ex: Arlen Specter) are no where near as good as the best Democratic senators in recent history (ex: Russ Feingold) George W. Bush was clearly a worse president than Bill Clinton.

But there is no denying that both parties serve the same corporate masters. The Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a perpetual game of “Good Cop, Bad Cop.” And this latest election cycle, and the first few months of Obama’s presidency, has made their pattern of action clear: 1) Get a conservative president or two (Reagan, Bush) into office, let them run the country into the ground. 2) Let the Dems take over for a while, but perpetuate Republican policy 3) Even though the Dems are essentially only maintaining previous Republican policy, attack, attack, attack 4) Get an even more conservative president into office. 5) Loop back to step 2.

At this stage of the process, the Republicans don’t need a strong political leader as long as their propaganda force -the Limbaughs and Becks – is in full effect. The Democrats evidently have no will to stand-up to these attacks, meaning we can expect a further rightward march off the cliff for the foreseeable future.

Missed this, it was originally posted on Lovecraft’s birthday:

“Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.”
- H. P. Lovecraft, Letters

“Now the trickiest catch in the Negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. The Black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists… But, it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the Negro were the White man’s equal.”
- H. P. Lovecraft, Letters

“Of course they can’t let Niggers use the beach at a Southern resort – can you imagine sensitive persons bathing near a pack of greasy chimpanzees? The only thing that makes life endurable where Blacks abound is the Jim Crow principle, and I wish they’d apply it in New York both to Niggers and to the more Asiatic types of puffy, rat-faced Jews!”
- H. P. Lovecraft, Letters

[...]

None of these texts are unpublished, or difficult to find, or unclear. H. P. Lovecraft was a racist. But his fame and influence is unaffected by his bigotry. This suggests that when someone is accused of bigotry this accusation may be an attack on that person, not on their ideas or behavior. Because others are given a free ride while being just as racist. Some are chosen to be branded a racist and are never forgiven. Others are forgiven. Amnesty doesn’t seem to be based on the actual ideas or behavior of the accused.

Full Story: OVO

There are several more instances at the link.

Harris said they had come to investigate a complaint related to the Campbell’s three children – Adolf Hitler Campbell, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell.

In the end, the agency chose to remove the children from their parents’ care, but they assured Harris it was not because of the children’s names.

“They assured me that removing the children had nothing to do with their names or the birthday cake incident. There were other factors that we were not privy to,” Harris told NBC10’s Doug Shimell Wednesday.

The sergeant said based on his personal experiences with Heath Campbell he could not think what the circumstances would be.

“Just from knowing Mr. Campbell from the past ten or so years, I’ve never known him to abuse his children and when he has talked about his children he has been very much into his kids. Very loving,” Harris said.

Full Story: MSNBC

The father of 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child’s full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance. Heath Campbell and his wife, Deborah, are upset not only with the decision made by the Greenwich ShopRite, but with an outpouring of angry Internet postings in response to a local newspaper article over the weekend on their flare-up over frosting. [...]

The Campbells’ other two children also have unusual names: JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell turns 2 in a few months and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell will be 1 in April.

Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because “no one else in the world would have that name.” He sounded surprised by all the controversy the dispute had generated.

Campbell said his ancestors are German and that he has lived his entire life in Hunterdon County. On Tuesday he wore a pair of black boots he said were worn by a German soldier during World War II.

Full Story: Associated Press

My opinion? ShopRite shoulda baked the cake. But “Adolf Hitler Campbell”? Seriously? Why does this guy hate his kids so much?

What do you think? Can what you name your kids constitute a form of abuse?

“They stare blankly into the lens, their lips tellingly pursed. All are the Norwegian subjects of a terrifying Nazi experiment. All were involved in one of the most shocking trials of eugenics the world has ever known. All are Lebensborn – the “spring of life”. And all are here to tell their stories for the first time.

The Lebensborn Society was born on 12 December 1935, the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s right-hand man and head of the SS. He had designed a project to promote an “Aryan future” for the Third Reich and turn around a declining birth rate in Germany. People were given incentives to have more children in the Fatherland as well as in occupied countries, most importantly in Scandinavia, where the Nordic gene – and its blond-haired, blue-eyed progeny – was considered classically Aryan.

But after the conflict had ended, many of the Norwegians born into the programme suffered. In an attempt to distance itself from the occupying forces, the Norwegian government publicly vilified the children born by Norwegian mothers and Nazi fathers. Many of those children subsequently experienced intense bullying, and in some cases, extreme mental and physical abuse. In recent years, a Lebensborn group in Norway has been fighting what it sees as the Norwegian government’s complicity in their horrific ordeal.”

(via The Independent)

Paul manages to most duck questions about how the hell he let this stuff come out under his name, saying only that he was too busy to read it.

He also makes the claim that he’s getting the most support from blacks. Even assuming he means only out of the Republican field, it’s still a suspect claim:

Paul wins the biggest chunk of the black vote, 22.2 percent, topping Mitt Romney’s 18.5 percent. One problem: There aren’t very many black New Hampshire Republicans. Only 27 were sampled in this poll, and Paul won six of them. Hey, he gets bragging rights.

(From Hit and Run).

Paul’s opposition to the drug war and the death penalty are commendable and he’s one of only 3 candidates (the other two are Kucinich and Gravel) to support those positions. Drug peace and abolition of the death penalty would vastly improve life in America for minorities. Looking at the rest of the Republican field you’ve got Giuliani’s racist campaigns, Huckabee consorting with Gary North (a former Ron Paul aide, btw), and a member of a church that wouldn’t allow black priests until 1978. It’s little wonder that Paul would attract comparable support to his competitors.

But it’s still hard to let Paul off the hook. Obviously, a guy who can’t deal with publishing an 8 page newsletter can’t handle running a country – no matter how commendable some of his ideals area. He also says the newsletters from the 1990s are “ancient history.” Here are a few things that aren’t ancient history:

In an interview on Meet the Press Ron Paul said he wouldn’t vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if it were introduced today (discussed on Technoccult here).

Paul voted against An amendment to the Voter’s Rights Act that would have served to reduce voter suppression tactics.

In a rare “yes” vote, Ron Paul voted for H.R.4844, dubbed “a 21st Century Poll Tax” by opponents.

These are specific, policy related positions Paul has taken recently. His rhetoric on immigration has also always bothered me, which is what made me start thinking he had a few race issues before I even found out about his newsletters.

To return briefly to the newsletters, Here’s Right Watch on the origin of the newsletters. Paul’s excuse that the he didn’t know about the content and doesn’t know who wrote them sounds less and less plausible, but until someone comes forward, it’s impossible to know.

Why are the newsletters important at all? The answer is that they contained more than just racially insensitive or politically incorrect rants. The author refers to black people as “animals” and talks about a coming race war. If you don’t understand why this is scary, read about The Turner Diaries and the beliefs of Charles Manson.

These also weren’t limited to personal opinions and paranoias – at least one policy prescription was made, and this was known before the TNR story: the author suggested that black youth, but not white youth, who commit violent crimes should be tried as adults.

The New Republic and Tucker Carlson are making themselves useful for a change. TNR has uncovered a number of Ron Paul’s old newsletters and they’re to be posted on their site on Friday tomorrow afternoon. Above, Carson interviews TNR’s Jamie Kirchick who says the newsletters refer to Martin Luthor King as a gay pedophile, calls black people “animals,” and encourages readers to stock up on guns and flee to the country to escape black people.

Previous Ron Paul coverage.

(via Hit and Run, where the general Paultard response is “media conspiracy!”).

Update: TNR posted Kirchick’s article, but their server crashed minutes later. I pasted the article into the comments. Still haven’t seen scans of the newsletter.

Late update: Newsletters are available here. Ron Paul responds to questions from Reason Magazine here. Reason’s editor-in-chief expresses disappointment.

Later update: Paul’s official response.

Was reading my new issue of Print — a design magazine I subscribe to — and the new issue is dedicated to “global graphics that inform, incite and inspire.” Anyone interested in propaganda might wanna check it out, as design has played a huge part in swaying public opinion for well over a century now.

On pg 72 (Print, Feb 2008), in “From Despotism to Destination,” Ben Carmichael writes about rebranding nations. He exposes American propaganda in the Middle East:

Countries that try to fake an image are countries that court disgrace — which is precisely what the U.S. got as a result of a disastrous recent campaign. Shortly after September 11, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell hired Ogilvy & Mather veteran Charlotte Beers to launch a pro-American advertising and public relations effort in the Middle East. As Powell put it, the goal was “to rebrand American foreign policy.” As a part of her “Shared Values” campaign, in 2002 Beers launched Hi magazine, meant for modern Arabic youth, Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language radio station, debuted the same year, and Alhurra, an Arabic-language satellite TV station, went on the air in 2004. Both are funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, formerly known as the United States Information Agency. So negative was Arab countries’ reaction to Beers’s programs that she left in 2003 before many of them got off the ground, though Radio Sawa and Alhurra are still on the air. Her successor, Margaret Tutwiler, lasted five months; Karen Hughes, who remained in office for two and a half years, announced her resignation on Halloween.

Karen Parfitt Hughes (born December 27, 1956) is a Republican politician from the state of Texas. She served as the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the U.S. Department of State with the rank of ambassador. She resides in Austin, Texas.

Karen Hughes To Work on The World’s View of U.S.
Can Karen Hughes help US image abroad?

Charlotte Beers (born July 26, 1935 in Beaumont, Texas) is an American businesswoman and former Under Secretary of State.

She was the first female vice-president at the JWT advertising firm, then CEO of Tatham-Laird & Kudner until 1992, and finally CEO of Ogilvy & Mather until 1996. In 1997, Fortune magazine placed her on the cover of their first issue to feature the most powerful women in America, for her achievements in the advertising industry. In 1999, Beers received the “Legend in Leadership Award” from the Chief Executive Leadership Institute of the Yale School of Management.

From October 2001 until March 2003, she worked for the Bush Administration administration as the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Bush’s Muslim propaganda chief quits
The invasion of Iraq hasn’t begun, but the U.S. marketing machine has been going strong

Aside from noting a few critical mistakes that they seem to have made with their Middle East propaganda efforts, it’s just that public image abroad is flagrant propaganda maintained by really old Republican Texan women. Ugh.

I came across Hughes name a second time in two days in the Washington Post article having to do with “Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach“:

Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane.

Those notions remain widespread even though the federal government now runs Web sites in seven languages to challenge them. Karen Hughes, who runs the Bush administration’s campaign to win hearts and minds in the fight against terrorism, recently painted a glowing report of the “digital outreach” teams working to counter misinformation and myths by challenging those ideas on Arabic blogs.

After leaving Paul alone for a month or two, I’ve got another post at my personal blog ripping on him for his astoundingly bad positions on racial issues.

Despite the fact that the CRA’s benefits have far outweighed any negative consequences, Paul would still vote against it. Why? Because, apparently, white people’s property rights are more important than black people’s individual liberties.

Over at the comments thread on Hit and Run amidst the pissing and moaning by Paultards that Russert actually took their candidate seriously enough to ask some grown-up questions, commenter Joe is addressing the issue well:

“Even if you don’t like the sections of the Civil Rights Act that banned discrimination in places of public accommodation, you need to acknowledge that adopting racial equality as the law of the land was a great step forward for freedom and justice. [...] All sorts of institutionalized policies intended to maintain segregation and the racial caste system were in place before the 1964 Act. [...] The racists who objected to black people sitting at lunch counters most certainly did solicit the government to help them oppress their neighbors. They supported all sorts of oppressive laws at the state and federal level, which the CRA repealed.”

Joe also got in a great one liner in response to someone who said the CRA had devastating effects: “Yeah, think of all those white people who didn’t get to have their own water fountains and schools.”

Full Story: Klintron’s Brain.

My first column for Alterati is up:

Maybe ‘you don’t haffi dread to be Rasta,’ but do you have to be Rasta to dread? Or, more directly: is it ok for white people to have dreads? This was one of the questions my local paper, the Oregonian, posed to local dreads. Of course, some black people objected to whites wearing locks. When my friend at the paper told me about the story, I immediately regurgitated the myth that ancient Celts used to have locks. But when I noticed that Celts were omitted from the Oregonian’s dreadlock timeline, I got curious about the truth of this claim.

Full Story: Alterati.

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

[...]

But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called ‘a very delicate time, and a dangerous time.’

‘There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,’ said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. ‘It’s not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.’

Full Story: The New York Times.

(via Hit and Run).