Much is being made of Martin Bashir’s comments at the UNITY Conference.  It seems like people are taking his comments as racism.  But if you watch the video, it’s pretty clear that his words are commentary on the American media’s inability to get off the race issue where Obama is concerned.  He’s not suggesting helpful hints for the media, he’s openly ridculing them - and to some extent, all of us - for the naked racism that dominates the coverage of Obama’s candidacy.  There’s even pundits out there - like Pat Buchanan, master of racist politics - who are openly trying to paint Barack Obama as “foreign,” “exotic,” and in any way they can, “other.”

But we’re pissed at Bashir for pointing this out at a diversity conference?  And if it keeps up, he’ll likely lose his job for having the balls to speak the truth.  How typically American.

You’ve heard Barack Obama say that John McCain is trying to scare voters because Obama doesn’t look like the other presidents on the dollar bill.  You may also have heard that John McCain said it was not him but Obama that was playing the race card.  If not, you doubtless will have after clicking the above link.

Well, what you probably haven’t seen - and neither has anyone else except those one or two people who ended up on the JohnMcCainforPresident.com website because they Googled “erectile dysfunction” - is the McCain campaign ad that does exactly what Barack Obama says it does: puts his face on the dollar bill, Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty, asking, “what will he want to change next?”  Check it out, via Crooks and Liars:

There’s a new blogger in town, here in DFE land, and his name is Jamie Piazza.  His first post is an interesting republication of an article about the legendary gods of Goth, The Cure, and the controversy surrounding their song Killing an Arab. How timely in so many ways!  Maybe it’s a good thing to remember that anti-Arab hate is not a new or original thing, born solely of a misplaced anger over 911.

Go check him out and say hello!

Whadda ya know? Bob Lonsberry is in hot water over racially-charged comments again. But he’s not racist. Good to know. The more I look around me, the more it looks like the Ninties all over again:

Bob Lonsberry Criticized Over Remarks - 13WHAM.com

In his remarks on June 10, Lonsberry said the Rochester City School District was setting racist standards for giving awards to black students who get a “B” average, while white students are held to higher requirements to receive awards.

I’d call the comments “borderline” at best. Probably not worth firing, but definitely worth a ton of grief for this idiot. At what point do you begin to realize that, once busted for racist remarks, one should probably eschew racially charged issues as often as possible? As I have pointed out in the past, there is a difference between racially insensitive speech and a bonafide racist, but that does not allow the non-clansman to simply escape reproach.

And before anyone starts crying “freedom of speech,” let me say that what you have a right as an individual to speak is not necessarily what is appropriate for you to say in the context of being a representative of an entire radio network. There is an expectation that, as a radio jock, you are capable of facing a microphone and speaking for a few hours without causing race hate. Is that so much to ask?

Lou Dobbs is something of a boner. It’s true. But to be publicly pooh-poohing the idea of an American “problem” discussing race, then inadvertently almost throw out the “cotton-pickin’” phrase?  Verifiably proving the colloquial traps that exist?  That is just priceless!

But set the gaff aside for now. I’m sure those of you who like to think are probably more irritated by what it is he’s actually saying, which is actually much stoopider than his slip of the tongue. » Continue Reading…

With all that this national Democratic primary race has come back again and again to the issue of race, there have been some undeniably deep wounds created in the process. There are a lot of hurt feelings going around, especially among those people in the Clinton camp who believe they’ve had their core values questioned. In the interest of perhaps bridging the gap between Clinton and Obama supporters, it is worth noting that there is a difference between racism and a racist.

Geraldine Ferraro does not consider herself to be a racist. This much is - to the Clinton campaign’s enduring chagrin - painfully obvious. And after all, Mrs. Ferraro has been a long-standing, good Democratic/Liberal soldier. I am sure that, if a bill came to the floor that sought to redress the injuries of black Americans, she probably voted for it. If a minority sought office where there had never been a minority, I’ll bet she encouraged them. Whatever the interpretation of her words about Obama, I am sure Mrs. Ferraro quite believed that she was celebrating the age of opportunity into which we may hope we are now passing.  It is certain in the way she went out again and again to defend herself that she was genuinely perplexed by the offense taken to her statement.

Indeed, I am sure Geraldine Ferraro is not a racist, and neither are most people racists who have been accused of making offensive racial statements. David Duke; Strom Thurman; these men are racists, and it’s actually a fairly high bar (or low, if you prefer) to pass if you’re looking to qualify. But just because you don’t walk around with Nazi symbols on your jacket does not mean you know everything there is to know about what offends people of other races and ethnicities. Just because you have not gone out of your way to disenfranchise someone of a different ethnic background does not mean that you have not unwittingly done so somewhere along the line, nor that you are incapable of doing so in the future.

Because racism - like sexism, like age discrimination, like religious discrimination, like a lot of things - is born more often than not out of the simple, everyday ignorance of which we are all guilty.  Sometimes, it’s genuine ignorance of fact, other times, it’s boneheadedly-clumsy speech as in the David Schuster “pimping” comment or Bill Clinton’s Jesse Jackson monolouge.

And in either case, it perpetuates harmful stereotypes or assumptions.  However unwitting an act of racism may be, it does harm.  In either case, it cannot go unaddressed.

But to be called out for saying something racist is not the same as being called a racist.  Had the Clinton campaign or Mrs. Ferarro chosen to take the criticism and moved on, the charges of racist statements would doubtless have been less damaging to the campaign.  To instead defend yourself as not being a racist just misses the point.

The NYT gives us a glowing endorsement of Barack Obama’s speech on race of yesterday morning. This is a fairly good summary of a speech that we’ll be talking about for a while. Obama is also set to give another speech tomorrow on Iraq and another one on the economy. I’m not sure thats all that good of an idea, since this one was so good. P.T. Barnum always said, “leave ‘em wanting more.”

But despite many in the media who keep asking over and over again, “is this dumb enough for the American people to handle?” this speech is getting lots of air time, and I think it will prove that we don’t need the distillation that the media insists on: the need for brevity is a byproduct of television news, not a necessity of the public:

Obama Chooses Reconciliation Over Rancor - New York Times

He faced a choice: Having already denounced Mr. Wright’s ferocious charges about white America, he could try to distance himself from the man who drew him to Christianity, married him and baptized his two children. Or he could try to explain what appeared to many to be the contradiction between Mr. Wright’s world view and the one Mr. Obama had professed as his own.

To some extent, he did both.

Just a quick bit after having just heard Obama’s entire speech on race.  Once again, like his speech on MLK Day, he was fearless in dealing with uncomfortable issues.  You can criticize him for his choice of solutions, perhaps, but you cannot say he glossed over the subjects that matter.

I was awestruck when on Martin Luther King’s birthday, I heard him talk about racism in the black community being a source of the black communities problems.  I was stunned when he enumerated all of the injustices - real injustices - that have been a continual source of anger and frustration for black Americans in this speech.  And when he made the problems of blue-collar white Americans dovetail with, rather than chafe against, the problems of the black community, I was inspired.

Politically, he covered every single issue I could think of that Conservatives and Fox News anchors could have used to dismiss the speech, but he did so in a way that made those excuses seem like the problem we know they are.  I think his speech served both his candidacy and his party and his country well.

I don’t see how this doesn’t change the entire tone of the conversation, if only because his speech turned on so many issues that have to directly affect the lives of so many Americans, including those in the media, that we feel compelled to talk about them.

I’m hoping the entire thing goes up on YouTube.  It deserves to be watched.

A study conducted by an umbrella of organizations including the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project in New York concludes that there were additional pressures on black and Latino borrowers to take the high-risk subprime mortgages that have now become such a huge problem:

Report: Minority US neighborhoods have disproportionate burden of subprime loans - News Wires - CNBC.com

The survey focused on lending to minority urban markets in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Rochester, New York. In six of these seven urban areas, high-risk lenders’ market share in minority neighborhoods was at least three times the share in white neighborhoods. . .Advocacy groups have said poor and minority borrowers who qualified for traditional loans were nevertheless steered into risky adjustable mortgages.

I don’t know the methodology of the study and I don’t discount the possibility that race may have played a factor in lending schemes for some companies, but I do note that there is no indication in this report that income levels were factored into the equation. Certainly in the City of Rochester, poorer neighborhoods have been more blighted by subprimes and foreclosures than, say, those neighborhoods bordering Brighton. And in many cases, those neighborhoods have a higher concentration of minorities. Since lower-income people were largely targeted for subprimes, once might draw the wrong conclusion unless income was taken into account.

In fact, the article seems to suggest that this study was based on communities rather than borrowers, which if true, is way off the mark scientifically speaking. To say that communities were targeted is different than saying race was targeted: that poor communities and minority communities tend to coexist in this country is another sin altogether.

And once again, we find that this report perpetuates the wrong-headed thinking that has predominated coverage of the ARM crisis:

Report: Minority US neighborhoods have disproportionate burden of subprime loans - News Wires - CNBC.com

This concentration means these minority communities will shoulder most of the negative impacts of the subprime crisis _ foreclosures, sinking property values, lower tax bases, abandoned homes and higher crime.

To re-re-reiterate the point, sinking property values are the reason that the current crisis is upon us, not the effect of said crisis. And lower tax bases are the inevitable result of lowering property values. Also, since the crisis is moving up the economic ladder, it’s probably premature to think that only those neighborhoods cited in the report will face increased foreclosure. There’s plenty of fancy homes sitting with for-sale signs out front, believe it.

I find this rather interesting in light of the current controversy: the Clinton Campaign seems to have been using Drudge as a means to disseminate information right along with the MSM.  Is it still believable, all you Clinton supporters, that the campaign doesn’t know who sent out the photo?