You're on notice, Kal Penn.

You're still on notice, buddy. But I do think Indians are cool. Especially that one up there. :)


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"Do you even know what it's like to be black?"

I'd still do him.

But I'd feel bad about it. For multiple reasons.

Like the fact that he's gay.

And the fact that I'm married.

But mostly because of the Republican thing. Ew.


 .

"What do you do if you find out that someone that you know is dating a racist?"

I'd talk to national television, too!


.

It's still funny a week later.

"Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for President as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke."

"Donald Trump owns the Miss USA pageant, which is great for Republicans, because it will streamline their search for a Vice President."

"Donald Trump said recently he has a 'great relationship with the blacks.' Though, unless 'the Blacks' are a family of white people, I bet he's mistaken."

Zing!


Additional hilarity from President Obama:





"I want to make clear to the Fox News table, that was a joke. That was not my real birth video. That was a children's cartoon. Call Disney if you don't believe me. They have the original longform version."


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"Why won't Barack Obama release his elementary school report cards?"

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
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"I have no proof that he's even a black man! He could be white! And if that's the case, I don't understand why we're questioning his legitimacy."


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"We're not campaigning. The election's over."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Did you readers see the Bipartisan Health Care Reform Summit 2010 this week on C-SPAN? Neither did I. But I did watch the highlights on The Daily Show on Thursday. The funny comes at 7:42, when John McCain starts babbling about change and the Louisiana Purchase (was he in Congress back then?), and then Barack Obama reminds him who the President of the United States is. Oh snap.

I also like the video below from Jay Smooth, who is now blogging at Nil Doctrine (clever), about the reaction Chris Matthews had to the State of the Union:

"To me, being black is an important part of who I am, that I'm proud of. And the word 'black', you know, people will say, 'I don't care if you're black or purple or orange.' But, even for you to say that is insulting to me, because black is not like purple or orange. It's not imaginary. Black describes a particular culture and history that's really rich and that I'm proud of."

Happy Black History Month to you, Mr. Smooth!

.

"There's the old boys club again."

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Obama: As A Woman, Michelle Had To Make Sacrifices I Didn't Have To, Huffington Post. Emphases mine.

President Barack Obama says his family is like a lot of others -- in which the men "need to be knocked across the head every once in a while" in order to see imbalances between the time moms and dads put into raising children.

"There's no doubt that our family, like a lot of families out there, were ones in which the men are still a little obtuse about this stuff," Obama said Wednesday in an interview with NBC.

He acknowledged things are different now for his wife, Michelle, and him given that they live in the White House with all its creature comforts and army of residence staff.

"Today's Obama family is obviously not typical," he said. "Five years ago, six years ago, though, we were having a lot of negotiations. Because Michelle was trying to figure out, OK, if the kids get sick why is it that she's the one who has to take time off of her job to go pick them up from school, as opposed to me? If, you know, the girls need to shop for clothes. You know, why is it that it's her burden and not mine."

The president said he tried to learn to be better -- "to be thoughtful enough and introspective enough that I wasn't always having to be told that things were unfair. That once in a while, I'd actually voluntarily say, 'You know what? Let me relieve this burden on you. Let me make some sacrifices, in terms of how I'm using my time.'"

He's the first to acknowledge his efforts weren't entirely successful.

"The truth is that Michelle still had to make sacrifices of the sort that I did not have to make," Obama said.

So let me get this straight. Just like in his book, The Audacity of Hope, President Obama acknowledged that there was a unfair division of household and child-rearing between him and his wife. Yet again, he decided to do nothing significant about it.

I resent the suggestion that someone needs to remind men to be functioning parents. No. Men should take care of the children that they decided to bring into the world in the first place. President Obama didn't accidentally have two children. He and the First Lady decided to have children together. And then he decided for some reason that raising the children was not his responsibility . . . because he was the one with the penis?

President Obama says that "Michelle still had to make sacrifices of the sort that [he] did not have to make", but he doesn't explain why his wife allegedly had to make them. Why did she have to be the one to disrupt her career to pick up the sick children and buy them clothes? If President Obama's children were sick, why wouldn't he pick them up from school? They are his children.

You don't deserve a medal for occasionally taking care of your own children. You can call it "obtuse"; I call it bleeping selfish. Add your own expletive, readers.

Obama also played down a recent basketball game with male members of his Cabinet and lawmakers. No women were listed as participants in the game, played on a White House court.

The president said it was a standing game among House members that simply relocated to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. He faced criticism for the all-guys game; Obama brushed it off and said it was nothing more than basketball.

"I think this is bunk," he said.

If you watch the video, the interviewer asks whether the game could have been seen as a networking opportunity with the President. However, President Obama does not buy into the notion that it was "something more than basketball."

Right. As if a group of politicians, who all happened to be men, showed up at the White House purely for the love of the game. No networking went on whatsoever. Just a bunch of grown men sweating it up together on a court.

Insert exaggerated eyeroll here.

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How dare he talk to our children?

Obama speech to students draws conservative ire, by Libby Quaid and Linda Stewart Ball, AP via Yahoo! News. Emphases mine.

President Barack Obama's back-to-school address next week was supposed to be a feel-good story for an administration battered over its health care agenda. Now Republican critics are calling it an effort to foist a political agenda on children, creating yet another confrontation with the White House.

Obama plans to speak directly to students Tuesday about the need to work hard and stay in school. His address will be shown live on the White House Web site and on C-SPAN at noon EDT, a time when classrooms across the country will be able to tune in.

Schools don't have to show it. But districts across the country have been inundated with phone calls from parents and are struggling to address the controversy that broke out after Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals urging schools to watch.

Districts in states including Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, Wisconsin have decided not to show the speech to students. Others are still thinking it over or are letting parents have their kids opt out.

Some conservatives, driven by radio pundits and bloggers, are urging schools and parents to boycott the address. They say Obama is using the opportunity to promote a political agenda and is overstepping the boundaries of federal involvement in schools.

"As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education — it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality," said Oklahoma state Sen. Steve Russell. "This is something you'd expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

That uppity so-and-so. He needs to know his place. Who does he think he is? The President of the United States?

Oh. Really? He is? Well, if you say so.

I would have loved if President Clinton had spoken to our class on television during the first day of school. Actually, I would have preferred Vice President Gore, because he was trying to save the environment. An address from Hillary Clinton would have been nice, too. What I'm saying is any excuse to watch TV during elementary school up through high school probably would have been appreciated by me and my classmates.

.

"She wants her America back? Go tell that to the Indians."

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Meaning the Native Americans, not the people from South Asia.

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"Do you think this is a teachable fart?"

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Yes I do, Stephen.


~


"I can never go to the library and take out books again. No longer. Because they banned me from the library."

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Reading is fundamental. As long as you pay your taxes in the correct district. Don't give me any excuses about being "a 7-year-old child." Books aren't free!


~


"You can't take 'fathers' out of 'founding fathers'. There's nothing more fatherly than wigs and capri pants."

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Hee hee, Tucker Carlson. He never gets better.

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We have come so far.

No, really, we have. That's not sarcasm. Much further than this:

Now we get this:

And this:

Though, no more of this:

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"Plus or minus black people"

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Because it's not enough to be born in this country to be considered a real American. This is why I never like to call anyone a hyphen-American. I've never even been to Africa. If only black people didn't vote. Or exist. Then the results would be more accurate?

Byron York responds to the claims that he is a racist, which, okay . . .? Instead of addressing the problems with the article he wrote--including a faulty poll which "divided respondents into black and white, with no other groups reported", as if no other people live in United States--Mr. York is worrying about allegedly being considered a racist. He should worry more about being considered a shoddy journalist.

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Neither of them is Hawaiian,

but one is half Samoan (and Canadian!) and the other is partially Japanese. The Japanese one still isn't any part black, so I don't know why he continues to play Barack Obama; I don't think he is channeling the President's white side.

Anyway, the dialogue and setup is funny. I hope that is an actual Hawaiian song.

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Musings from a black woman: Oh, really?

The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of "whiteness" as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

The End of White America?, by Hua Hsu, The Atlantic. Super long post ahead. Pace yourselves, readers.

I first heard about this article on Tuesday's episode of The Colbert Report. So much to break down, so little time. To simplify my point, I will say this: white Americans make up 75% of the United States, the majority of the US Senate and the House of Representatives, the majority of Fortune 500 CEOs, and almost all of the main characters (and supporting characters) in US movies and television. One black family in the White House is not going to displace over 225 million people from their centuries-old dominance in this country.

As Bill Imada, head of the IW Group, a prominent Asian American communications and marketing company, puts it: "I think in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, [for] anyone who immigrated, the aspiration was to blend in and be as American as possible so that white America wouldn’t be intimidated by them. They wanted to imitate white America as much as possible: learn English, go to church, go to the same schools."

Today, the picture is far more complex. To take the most obvious example, whiteness is no longer a precondition for entry into the highest levels of public office. The son of Indian immigrants doesn’t have to become "white" in order to be elected governor of Louisiana. A half-Kenyan, half-Kansan politician can self-identify as black and be elected president of the United States.

However, there seems to be a one-black person limit for the US Senate, as well as for the Supreme Court.

Peter Rosenberg, a self-proclaimed "nerdy Jewish kid" and radio personality on New York’s Hot 97 FM—and a living example of how hip-hop has created new identities for its listeners that don’t fall neatly along lines of black and white—shares another example: "I interviewed [the St. Louis rapper] Nelly this morning, and he said it’s now very cool and in to have multicultural friends. Like you’re not really considered hip or 'you’ve made it' if you’re rolling with all the same people."

"Hey, Guillermo."

"What's up, Jamal?"

"Peter Rosenberg says that Nelly says it's very 'cool' and 'in' to have multicultural friends. And if you do have them, then you've made it."

"Made what?"

"I don't know, Guillermo. I still can't get a job with my degree in Sociology."

"It wasn't acceptable before to have multicultural friends?"

"Apparently not."

"But Jamal, we've been friends with Pierre and Hans and Padma and Xochitl for 15 years now, based on our similar interests and personalities, not because it's a trend. I wonder if Peter Goldberg has any multicultural friends."

"I doubt it."

Pop culture today rallies around an ethic of multicultural inclusion that seems to value every identity—except whiteness. "It’s become harder for the blond-haired, blue-eyed commercial actor," remarks Rochelle Newman-Carrasco, of the Hispanic marketing firm Enlace. "You read casting notices, and they like to cast people with brown hair because they could be Hispanic. The language of casting notices is pretty shocking because it's so specific: 'Brown hair, brown eyes, could look Hispanic.' Or, as one notice put it: 'Ethnically ambiguous.'"

Ethnically ambiguous usually translates to "light enough not to scare white people. But not white people like me. I'm one of the good ones! I'm not a racist. I just cater to the alleged racism of other people. Please don't hurt me!" For examples, please see Vanessa in Gossip Girl and Jennifer Beals's character in Flashdance (and Vin Diesel in general), both of whom had conveniently absent parents and no visible siblings, so that ethnic classification was impossible.

Furthermore, I do not understand how in an article about Barack Obama Mr. Hsu can seriously worry about laughable notion that there are fewer opportunities for white actors. Does he not know that every Saturday night, the almost entirely white male cast of SNL has their show open with Fred Armisen, made up in Angelina Jolie's brownface paint, playing a self-identified black man?

"I think white people feel like they’re under siege right now—like it's not okay to be white right now, especially if you’re a white male," laughs Bill Imada, of the IW Group. Imada and Newman-Carrasco are part of a movement within advertising, marketing, and communications firms to reimagine the profile of the typical American consumer. (Tellingly, every person I spoke with from these industries knew the Census Bureau’s projections by heart.)

"There’s a lot of fear and a lot of resentment," Newman-Carrasco observes, describing the flak she caught after writing an article for a trade publication on the need for more-diverse hiring practices. "I got a response from a friend—he's, like, a 60-something white male, and he’s been involved with multicultural recruiting,” she recalls. "And he said, 'I really feel like the hunted. It's a hard time to be a white man in America right now, because I feel like I’m being lumped in with all white males in America, and I've tried to do stuff, but it's a tough time.'"

"I always tell the white men in the room, 'We need you,'" Imada says. "We cannot talk about diversity and inclusion and engagement without you at the table. It's okay to be white!

"But people are stressed out about it. 'We used to be in control! We're losing control!'"

You know what I would tell them? Get over it. I would say it to their faces, too. Boo-hoo. You feel like you're "lumped in with all the white males in America"? Yeah, that's "tough". It's tough to be overrepresented in every boardroom, country club, television screen, movie screen, medical study, advertisement, book and magazine produced in the country you were born in. It's tough having one out of 44 leaders of your country, who has been in control for less than 100 days, not look exactly like you. What do you want, a cookie? Stop being so ignorant, and have some historical and cultural perspective.

“I get it: as a straight white male, I’m the worst thing on Earth,” Christian Lander says. Lander is a Canadian-born, Los Angeles–based satirist who in January 2008 started a blog called Stuff White People Like (stuffwhitepeoplelike.com), which pokes fun at the manners and mores of a specific species of young, hip, upwardly mobile whites. (He has written more than 100 entries about whites’ passion for things like bottled water, “the idea of soccer,” and “being the only white person around.”) At its best, Lander’s site—which formed the basis for a recently published book of the same name (reviewed in the October 2008 Atlantic)—is a cunningly precise distillation of the identity crisis plaguing well-meaning, well-off white kids in a post-white world.

“Like, I’m aware of all the horrible crimes that my demographic has done in the world,” Lander says. “And there’s a bunch of white people who are desperate—desperate—to say, ‘You know what? My skin’s white, but I’m not one of the white people who’s destroying the world.’”

For Lander, whiteness has become a vacuum. The “white identity” he limns on his blog is predicated on the quest for authenticity—usually other people’s authenticity. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab onto. You’re jealous! Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language. White culture is Family Ties and Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses—like, this is white culture. This is all we have.”

Lander’s "white people” are products of a very specific historical moment, raised by well-meaning Baby Boomers to reject the old ideal of white American gentility and to embrace diversity and fluidity instead. (“It’s strange that we are the kids of Baby Boomers, right? How the hell do you rebel against that? Like, your parents will march against the World Trade Organization next to you. They’ll have bigger white dreadlocks than you. What do you do?”) But his lighthearted anthropology suggests that the multicultural harmony they were raised to worship has bred a kind of self-denial.

1. Christian Lander is Canadian; I thought we were talking about the United States.

2. "All" Christian Lander has is a multiple book deal, along with multiple mentions in popular, respected magazines like The Atlantic, or lesser known publications like The Boston Globe or The Los Angeles Times or The New York Times or CNN.

So, what's your damage, Heather?

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University who is a fan of Lander's humor, has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: "They don’t care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, 'I don't have a culture.' They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture … They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don’t have a culture that’s cool or oppositional." Wray says that this feeling of being culturally bereft often prevents students from recognizing what it means to be a child of privilege—a strange irony that the first wave of whiteness-studies scholars, in the 1990s, failed to anticipate.

"Culture" doesn't pay the rent or put food on my family. Additionally, not all white people are culturally broke, privileged or loaded socioeconomically. Matt Wray should speak with Rochelle Newman-Carrasco's white male friend, because as that friend told us, white people are not all the same.

. . . we aspire to be post-racial, but we still live within the structures of privilege, injustice, and racial categorization that we inherited from an older order. We can talk about defining ourselves by lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially coded. We know, more or less, that race is a fiction that often does more harm than good, and yet it is something we cling to without fully understanding why—as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we make solid through culture and speech.

But maybe this is merely how it used to be—maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. "You have a lot of young adults going into a more diverse world," [Karl Carter, of Atlanta’s youth-oriented GTM Inc. (Guerrilla Tactics Media)] remarks. For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. "We came along in a generation that didn't have to follow that path of race," he goes on. "We saw something different." This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it.

It would be nice if that bridge was available to the many colorful students who are stuck in failing schools that were made worse by No Child Left Behind, or if it were available to those kids who can't escape the institutional poverty and/or racism that plagues them every day.

I leave you with a group of individuals on their own bridge, from Gs to Gents.

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"Yes, I thought I'd live to see this day."

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I thought I had made that clear with my Morgan Freeman references. So you can stop asking us that question any time now.

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I can finally talk with most of my friends.

How did we communicate before Barack Obama? Oh yeah, through television.

Talk About Race? Relax, It’s O.K., by Sarah Kershaw, New York Times via Jezebel.

. . . over the last few months, both Mr. Rice and Ms. Knox, who live in Washington, have been struck by the slight easing of these examples of what psychologists describe as "interracial anxiety" between blacks and whites. That is because there is a now an omnipresent icebreaker: Barack Obama.

"There’s a more readily accessible conduit into the conversation about race if it begins with Barack Obama," said Mr. Rice, the executive director of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials — International, a professional law enforcement group. "In my experience over the last few months, it’s easier because it’ll begin with who he is, the differences between his parents, what he had to deal with." . . .

. . . "Before Obama, there was always this thing — 'He's a black doctor,'" Mr. Jackson said. “But now I’m going to be a physician who also happens to be black. That’s become the perception now, which is really nice." . . .

. . . On the morning after the election, Kristin Rothballer, 36, who lives in San Francisco, kissed her female partner goodbye on the train while commuting to work. A black woman who sat down next to her turned and said she was sorry that Proposition 8, the amendment to ban gay marriage in the state, looked like it was going to pass.

"We grabbed hands," Ms. Rothballer recalled. "And I said, 'Well, I really want to congratulate you because we have a black president and that’s amazing.'"

"Our conversation then almost became about the fact that we were having the conversation," she said.

Something moved her to apologize to the black woman for slavery. [Readers, do not do this.]

"For two strangers riding a train to Oakland to have that conversation about race, it wouldn't have been possible if Obama hadn't been elected," she said. 'I always felt open with my colleagues, but to say to a stranger on the train, 'Hey, I’m sorry about slavery,' that just doesn’t happen."

It's too bad that with Bill Richardson gone, I still can't talk with my Latino friends. I doubt I'll ever be able to talk with my Asian friends, or to my friends who don't fit into the ethnic roles designated by the U.S. Census.

Also, this article was in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times. I guess black is the new black. Oy.

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The Receptionist and The First Lady

Will Michelle Obama Spark the Next 'Mommy Wars' Skirmish?, by PunditMom, BlogHer.

The momification of Michelle Obama, by Rebecca Traister, Salon.

The Associated Press wondered what kind of first lady Michelle will be, and concludes, "the kind of first lady this country has not seen in decades." You mean, the kind with a high-powered job? No, "the mother of young children." True enough, and the AP story did include the fact that Michelle is known to be her husband's closest advisor. But it made sure to emphasize the campaign's assertions that "she is not interested in shaping policy or reserving a seat for herself at her husband's decision-making table. She prefers, at least for now, to focus on easing the transition for Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7 -- getting them in new schools, settled and comfortable with a new way of life." Indeed, Michelle herself has been flogging the term "mom-in-chief" as the cheerily unthreatening title she'll assume when she gets to the White House . . .

. . . Prior to Hillary Clinton, we'd never had a first lady who had a post-graduate degree. Michelle Obama went to college at Princeton and law school at Harvard. She was a practicing lawyer at the Chicago firm Sidley Austin when she was assigned to mentor the summer associate who would become her husband. She was his mentor . . .

In one of the smartest pieces that has been written about the next first lady, Geraldine Brooks' profile of her in the October issue of More magazine, Brooks writes that while you can see Michelle's life as the quintessential modern woman's success story, the trajectory can also be read as a "depressingly retrograde narrative of stifling gender roles and frustrating trade-offs." In serious ways, Brooks writes, "it is her husband's career, his choices -- choices she has not always applauded -- that have shaped her life in the last decade."

I am so tired. I'm tired of women in my media regressing to roles befitting Leave it to Beaver or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or even I Dream of Jeannie. These women have powers far beyond those of their male partners. Yet these women choose to play down their powers as much as they can so as not to overshadow their men.

I didn't look hard enough to find similar articles about Pam on The Office, so I'll summarize the situation. (You can watch the latest episode, "Frame Toby", on the NBC website, until it is taken away.) Pam leaves her receptionist job in Scranton, PA, (yes, that Scranton) to attend art school in New York City for three months, where she can exercise her notable talent. At the end of three months, Pam fails a class and must decide whether to stay in New York to retake it. Instead of continuing to follow her dream, she returns to Scranton, to her receptionist job at a failing company, so that she can be with her fiancé Jim, who is stuck in a dead-end career at the same company. Jim then buys his parents' crumbling house--thereby acquiring major debt in a depreciating investment vehicle during a recession [look at my fancy book-learning!]--and "surprises" Pam with it. And Pam . . . loves it? Her exact words are, "You bought me a house!"

Yeah, no. I understand that the writers of The Office had to lock down Jim and Pam in Scranton so that the series could continue. However, the series has now passed the point of plausibility in many regards, including the Jim and Pam story. The writers have given no explanation for why Jim couldn't move to New York and accelerate his career at the corporate office; the corporate executives already want him to work there. That way Jim could be with Pam, and support Pam's dreams to work as a skilled artist in New York. But no, they are both back in Scranton. Why? So that they can be Ozzie and Harriet.

It leads me back to the First Lady and President-elect, and to what I was talking about in August, when the John Edwards scandal was a-buzzing. At the moment, I am working so hard in so many ways to make my career and my life successful. Yet the most prominently featured woman in the United States media has traded in her higher education to become Donna Reed. I hadn't thought about this before, but there is going to be someone in the White House who looks like me. That should be cause for celebration. I'm sure people think I'm jazzed about First Lady Michelle Obama. But I'm not. Because I see exactly what's going on. Michelle Obama is being painted as someone's wife/mom/decorator. Or, as in the case of The Stephanie Miller Show yesterday morning, she is categorized as a black woman with a large behind. And in many ways, Michelle Obama isn't challenging that characterization.

"The primary focus for the first year will be making sure that the kids make it through the transition," [Michelle Obama] said, sitting alongside her husband [on 60 Minutes]. "But there are many issues that I care deeply about." She cited two that she focused on during the campaign: Military families, and the work-family balance.

One part of these situations that irks me greatly is the complicity of the men involved. Rebecca Traister calls it "crucial (and heartening)". However, silence is acceptance, no matter how much Barack Obama acknowledges "that Michelle's challenges in these coming years may not be much fun for her." Don't sit there watching your wife's career and individual identity slip away from her; do something about it.

. . . In "The Audacity of Hope," he describes the gradual tipping of the professional scales in his relationship with Michelle, as she allows him to become a distraction, and then a date, and then a husband and a father, at the same time that he is becoming a politician. At first, he writes, they were both "working hard," he as a civil rights lawyer and a professor, she for the city and at Public Allies. Then they had Malia, and "the strains in our relationship began to show."

When he launched his congressional run, Barack writes, "Michelle put up no pretense of being happy with the decision. My failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endearing. Leaning down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek. By the time Sasha was born ... my wife's anger toward me seemed barely contained."

Barack continues, "No matter how liberated I liked to see myself as -- no matter how much I told myself that Michelle and I were equal partners, and that her dreams and ambitions were as important as my own -- the fact was that when children showed up, it was Michelle and not I who was expected to make the necessary adjustments. Sure, I helped, but it was always on my terms, on my schedule. Meanwhile, she was the one who had to put her career on hold." Barack considers his dawning realization that in his wife, as in so many working women, there was a battle raging. "In her own mind, two visions of herself were at war with each other," he writes. "The desire to be the woman her mother had been, solid, dependable, making a home and always there for her kids, and the desire to excel in her profession, to make her mark on the world and realize all those plans she'd had on the very first day that we met."

What a touching story. He tried to help. It's so sad that Barack Obama hands were tied by his own naked ambition. I must dab the tears from my eyes.

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Musing from a black woman: Barack Obama = African American

Yesterday I was greeted with this questionable, newsy article on the Yahoo! front page: Obama victory opens door to new black identity, by Jesse Washington, AP via Yahoo! News.

Before Tuesday, black identity and community were largely rooted in the shared experience of the struggle — real or perceived — [Apparently my struggle is now perceived] against a hostile white majority. Even as late as Election Day, many blacks still harbored deep doubts about whether whites would vote for Obama.

Obama's overwhelming triumph cast America in a different light. There was no sign of the "Bradley Effect," when whites mislead pollsters about their intent to vote for black candidates. Nationwide, Obama collected 44 percent of the white vote, more than John Kerry, Al Gore or even Bill Clinton, exit polls show . . .

. . . Certainly racism did not disappear after Obama's white votes were counted. No one is claiming that black culture and pride and community are no longer valuable. Many also dismiss the idea of a "post-racial" America as long as blacks and other minorities are still disproportionately afflicted by disparities in income, education, health, incarceration and single parenthood.

But white groups that once faced discrimination, such as the Italians, Jews and Irish, have moved from the margins to the mainstream. America debated whether John F. Kennedy could become the first Catholic president; now that's a historical footnote.

If I ever again have to hear someone mention groups of white people who had been discriminated against in the past, and then equate them with black people who continue to be discriminated against in the present, it will be too soon. There are historical differences amongst various oppressed ethnic groups, and it is unwise to ignore those differences. For instance, the ancestors of Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, Irish Americans and Catholic Americans (some of whom are all the same people) came to the United States relatively voluntarily. Whereas the ancestors of many (though not all) black Americans did not come to the United States voluntarily; they just happened to survive the Middle Passage.

This seemingly endless election and the final results have reminded me of something Wanda Sykes said in her Comedy Central Presents special. She repeated in her book, Yeah, I Said It:

I'm not politically correct. I still say black. I say it because with African American, there's no bonus. It doesn't make your life any easier. You don't see black people standing around, saying, "Oh yeah, African American. Man, I'll tell ya, this beats the hell outta being black. We should've made the switch years ago. Oh, this is nice."

You don't see any of us going into Bank of America, "Excuse me, I'm here to pick up my loan."

"Uh, Ms. Sykes, you were rejected for that loan last week."

"Oh, that was last week. I was black then. See, I'm African American now. I'll just go in the vault and take what I need. I'll sign on my way out."

African American ain't helping nobody. You think Rodney King's black ass is sitting somewhere, saying, "Damn, if I just would have waited two years before I acted a fool, they wouldn't have been beating my black ass. I would have been African American." . . .

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This is how far we have come

Obama's victory caps struggles of previous generations. Hooray!

New Congress turns more -- much more -- Democratic. Hooray!

Prop. 2, animal protection measure, wins. Hooray for the animals that we're going to eat?

Early numbers favor same sex marriage ban in California. What?

I would like to note that over 6 million Californians voted to protect the animals, while under 5 million Californians voted to protect the rights of their fellow human beings.

Some may say, "you should be happy about the first black guy in the White House." Well, I am happy that the reign of terror will be over soon. However, the video below displays one of the many reasons why I continue to be concerned, nay disappointed, in the direction of this country, especially with two men in charge who think that some people should be separate but equal:

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"We cannot let Mickey Mouse vote."

So that's what the controversy is about. No need to fact-check; I trust Stephen's gut.

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