We Shouldn't Stop Talking About Race

By: Nathan McCall

One day I asked my college students their views on the state of race in America. A young lady rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue. "Well," she said, "maybe if everybody stopped talking about it so much, it would go away."

"Actually," I told her, "it won't."

Anybody who thinks they can simply wish away the frustrations of race is ignoring this country's very identity. It is as steeped in our culture as the American flag. From the nation's founding, race was an idea constructed to justify slavery. For some it has been a serviceable, if destructive, tool ever since.

Consider radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who regularly uses race to rally millions of loyal listeners with loaded statements, such as "melanin is thicker than water." And what about Glenn Beck, who pumped up the volume, ranting that the term "African American" is "stupid"? CONTINUE....

Is Satoshi Kanazawa The Glenn Beck Of Pseudoscience?

Image by San Diego Shooter via Flickr

By: Sheree Crute

It's only been a few weeks or so since controversial evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa posted the blog heard round the world -- his blatantly discriminatory study, "Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" In a nearly unanimous verdict, Kanazawa's peers -- his fellow science bloggers and psychologists -- have found him guilty of perpetrating pseudoscience, embarrassing the profession of evolutionary biology and offending multitudes of black women and men.

Actually, black women are just Kanazawa's latest target. His page on the London School of Economics' site shows that he's also denigrated the poor and asserted that racism in the United States is a myth, among other claims. CONTINUE....

White America Has Lost Its Mind

Todd Harrison (iStockphoto)

By Steven Thrasher

About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel.

It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing. White people, after all, had managed to invent a spiffy new form of self-government so that all white men (and, eventually, women) could have a say in how white people were taxed and governed. White minds had also nearly universally occupied just about every branch of that government and, for more than two centuries, had kept sole possession of the leadership of its executive branch (whose parsonage, after all, is called the White House).

But when that streak was broken—and, for the first time, a non-white president accepted the oath of office—white America rapidly began to lose its grip.

MORE....