white weekend links

• "The Ugly Side of Disaster: Racism and the Calculus of Comparative Suffering" (Tim Wise @ Counterpunch)
  
  Disasters bring out the best and worst in people. . . . This week, as Iowans and some in Illinois watched flood waters rise ever higher, [Rush] Limbaugh took to the air to contrast these supposedly good and decent people who have joined forces to help each other, with the presumably evil, lazy and violent folks of New Orleans, who we are told, did nothing but foment criminality and wait for the government to save them during flooding there in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
  
  
  
• "President Obama? Many White Supremacists are Celebrating" (Mark Potok @ Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch)
  
  With the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate clinched, large sections of the white supremacist movement are adopting a surprising attitude: Electing America’s first black president would be a very good thing. It’s not that the assortment of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, anti-Semites and others who make up this country’s radical right have suddenly discovered that a man should be judged based on the content of his character, not his skin. On the contrary. A growing number of white supremacists, and even some of those who pass for intellectual leaders of their movement, think that a black man in the Oval Office would shock white America, possibly drive millions to their cause, and perhaps even set off a race war that, they hope, would ultimately end in Aryan victory.
  
  
  
• "Diversity in Entertainment: Why Is TV So White?" (Jennifer Armstrong & Margeaux Watson @ Entertainment Weekly)
  
  Today the current prime-time lineup, including fall's 14 new scripted shows, is looking alarmingly pale. According to an Entertainment Weekly study of scripted-programming casts for the upcoming fall 2008 season, each of the five major broadcast networks is whiter than the Caucasian percentage (66.2 percent) of the United States population, as per the 2007 census estimate. And all of the networks are representing considerably lower than the Latino population percentage of 15.2 percent, with The CW — whose only lead Latina star, JoAnna Garcia, will be playing a white character named Megan Smith on Surviving the Filthy Rich — registering just 3.8 percent.
  
  
  
• "Why Should White People Fight Racism? Take Three" (One Drop @ Too Sense)
  
  [As] white people, we are the beneficiaries of the most extensive affirmative-action program in history, particularly white men. Access to the best education (or even, in some instances, any education at all) has been reserved for us. The highest-paying jobs, the most prestigious professions, have all been set aside for us and us alone. The vast majority of long-term material wealth, in terms of land and liquid assets, is owned by us. You want quotas? We've had the quota system of all quota systems protecting our social status for centuries. Only in the last sixty years or so has any of this begun to change.
  
  
  
• "The 'F' Word and the White Press: The Editorial Sins of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright" (Rev. William E. Alberts @ Counterpunch)
  
  The editorial “sin” of Minister Farrakhan and Rev. Wright is their clarity about and courage to confront, rather than accommodate, the “white supremacy” continuing to dictate life, liberty and the pursuit of access in America. The threat they pose is not their power to “divide” but to unite black and other persons at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, which certainly would have a divisive effect on whiteness as the invisible means into America’s mainstream. Thus the guardian media demonize them, and in so doing unknowingly further ordain them as prophets—and at the same time betray their own continuing role as the “white press,” which is what most black people called mainstream media during the 1967 urban riots in American cities.
  
  
  
• "Racial Identity's Gray Area: The Definition of Whiteness Continues to Shift" (June Kronholz @ The Wall Street Journal)
  
  [The] the definition of who is white may change again -- and again. A century ago, Americans faced the same predictions about the loss of the white majority that they do today. Then, with Eastern and Southern Europeans flooding in, it was predicted that Caucasians would fall into the minority by 1950, says the University of Illinois's [David] Roediger. Those Italians, Slavs and other immigrants eventually were redefined as white as they assimilated and moved up the economic ladder. "That same thing could happen again," Dr. Roediger says -- this time, with minorities and immigrants changing their racial identities themselves.
  
  
  
• "The Incredibly White College World Series" (Gregory Ruehlmann @ The Root)
  
  Every June I find myself watching the College World Series, but never for long. Collegiate baseball isn't something I follow in the regular season, mostly because it's rarely televised before tournament time. I almost never pay attention to the score. For me, the CWS is more of a TV spectacle out of which I make my own sort of game. I call it "Count All the Caucasians." It's a game that at first is amusing, then highly discouraging; it is also short. Whether the cameras of ESPN2 are following the play-by-play, zooming into the dugouts or just panning the crowd, within a few minutes my tally overwhelms me.
  
  
  
• "Fear of a Black President" (Seth Grahame-Smith @ The Huffington Post)
  
  A black man may well become the leader of the free world. And even for someone who fancies himself a progressive, that's forced me to take a long, hard look at what that would really mean to my white mind. To identify that tiny, obscure part of me that's suddenly afraid, and find out what its problem is. Here's what I found.