Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell in The Nation has an interesting article on the meaning of President Obama’s choice to identify as “black” on the census. On the form, you have the option to identify with more than one race, but the president did not. Professor Harris-Lacewell points out that Obama really does not fit the stereotypes of a black man and that his very existence creates a kind of “definitional crisis for whiteness”.

Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black. Remember, his understanding of race and politics was frozen in 1960, when a significant number of blacks still identified themselves as Republican, an Ivy League education was a marker of whiteness and military service a common career path for young black men. Remember that he would expect marriage stability among whites and sexual immorality to mark black life. It’s entirely possible that our Rip would guess that Obama was the white candidate and McCain the black one.

20 years ago, this black man, fresh out of the Army, spent the summer of 1990 reviewing questionnaires for the U.S. Census. I lived on the North Side of Chicago,in Edgewater, a true melting pot with people not only of every race, but immigrants from every part of the world. We received a fair number of forms with multiple races checked off and hand-written explanations of why various choices were made that more resembled the answers to an essay question than a multiple choice questionnaire.

This caused no end of debate in the office as we went back and forth about how to properly log in the responses. There was no code for “Black/Asian/Hungarian,with a touch of Cherokee”.

Of course, race and ethnicity are complicated matters for many people. I wouldn’t pass anyone’s paper bag test, but there is surely white blood in my family. Should I check “black” and “white” on the form? What about my Nashville relatives, several of whom are light-skinned with freckles? What of my wife’s cousins,the children of a half-black, half-Hispanic mother and white father?

To me, the answer is simple:the census form is really about the federal government trying to figure out how to allocate resources. As the billboard near my home argues, how can the feds know that your community needs more teachers if it doesn’t know that there are more kids?  But for many of us, the census form raises questions of identity that are hard to ignore. That the president has placed a stake in the ground of his blackness is gratifying to some and irritating to others. The professor has a theory as to why. You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. 

Submitted without comment…(WTF?!)

Just the other day I was thinking about how back in my youth, I read about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and Aliens and ESP and how I now accept that it was all a (fun) bunch of hooey. 

Except extraterrestrials.  It’s a big universe out there and I suspect that, somewhere, there is other intelligent life.

 And I sure hope it never finds us. Because any alien with the technology to get here from there, could probably eat us for lunch. 

Turns out Stephen Hawking agrees with me. He also summed it up better than I ever could:

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when
Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very
well for the Native Americans.”

I doubt it will turn out much better for the Native Earthers. Be very afraid.

NYT’s columnist Charles Blow headed down to the Dallas Tea Party rally on Tax Day to see all of the diversity he’d been hearing about.  In his opinion, most of the diversity was on the stage and virtually none in the crowd.

The juxtaposition was striking: an abundance of diversity on the stage and a dearth of it in the crowd, with the exception of a few minorities like the young black man who carried a sign that read “Quit calling me a racist.”

Lately, this seems to be the complaint about the Tea Party rallies.  They’ve gone from having virtually no diversity to dragging anyone that isn’t a middle-aged white male up onto the podium, as long as they’re rabidly anti enough. Anti-government, anti-Democrat, and especially anti-Obama. And they have found some doozies.

I found the imagery surreal and a bit sad: the minorities trying
desperately to prove that they were “one of the good ones”; the
organizers trying desperately to resolve any racial guilt among the crowd. The message was clear: How could we be intolerant if these multicolored faces feel the same way we do?

Blow summed it up as a “political minstrel show”.

Ouch.

One of those speakers, Alfonzo Rachel, a young black (don’t you dare say African-hypenated-American!) responded on to Blow on YouTube. Blow had criticized Rachel’s s downing the president for acting unconstitutionally after “Zo” admitted on his website that drug use had cost him his “graduation”. Zo riffed on this criticism to in turn criticize Democrats in general for their drug use, though it seems clear to me that Blow was more focused on Rachel’s admitted lack of education.

What do you think?

The Sun-Times had an article about the Taste of Chicago banning five suburban restaurants for not having a Chicago presence.

It’s Taste of Chicago — not Taste of Chicagoland, Taste of
Schaumburg or Taste of Riverside.

That’s the message City Hall is delivering to suburban restaurants.
They’re no longer welcome at Chicago’s annual orgy of food and music.

Just in time for its 30th anniversary, Taste of Chicago is “returning
to its roots” — by banning suburban restaurants.

Suburban food vendors — at least one of whom has been part of the
event since its 1980 inception on North Michigan Avenue — blasted the
new policy as risky and wrong-headed.

I wrote a quick response over on Gadling, the travel site for real travelers, as opposed to fake armchair travelers like me:

Chicagoan all of my life.

Preferred seating for the pavillion is silly.

But I agree with returning to a Chicago focus.

The Taste is a great event, but over the years it changed considerably. My understanding is that it started out as a way to highlight Chicago restaurants.  You went to the festival, you had a small “taste” of a restaurant there, and that prompted you to seek out that restaurant later.  Accordingly, the price was such that you could go to several vendors and hopefully get a real sampling. Many vendors complained about the costs of participating in the event.

But nowadays, many restaurants sell what amounts to full meals, and in most cases, sell them at full-meal prices. And that has led to the event going from a loss leader to a profit center for several restaurants. I suspect that is why restaurants from the suburbs can make a go of it–they’re not there to drum up business–they are there to make money. Of course, any business they do drum up then goes to Riverside or Berwyn or wherever.  Great places, but I’m not sure how that helps Chicago.

Not sure why you think a Chicago festival that focuses on Chicago vendors will discourage tourists from visiting Chicago.

But you’re right about Milwaukee’s Summerfest–it’s great.  And the suburbs have a number of great festivals. But when I go there, I don’t go for Chicago’s Harold’s Chicken or Eli’s Cheesecake.

What do you think?

Greetings from, Joshstoneistan!

Talking Points Memo reports that members of the Hutaree Militia had created a large map of the United States and divided it up into new countries and cities named after themselves:

The ex-fiance of the leader of the Hutaree Christian militia tells
the AP that the group harbored delusions of grandeur to the point
that they created “a big map on a room in their house of their own
country and their own names of their countries and cities and stuff.”

I would PAY to see this map!