White People

A small group of people wearing Ku Klux Klan garb handed out fliers about white racial pride yesterday afternoon at Catherine Avenue and Mountain Road in the Green Haven neighborhood of Pasadena, area residents said.A 17-year-old girl said members of the group wore white hoods and sheets, and she saw them talking with state police officers."The lack of white pride is truly a sad and strange thing, because no group has more right to rightful pride than the white people of the world," the fliers said, according to Michael Arrington, 18, of 225th Street in Pasadena, about five blocks from where the Klan distributed the leaflets.

THE LEWINSKY mess is depriving our nation of the chance to see how far President Clinton might have gone with his efforts to keep race relations at the top of the American agenda.This effort is no small task. Public perceptions on race are as diverse and divergent as the American population.There is a large segment of white people who would rather believe that that this is a colorblind culture. We've dealt with race, they say, now let's move on.On the other hand, some high-profile black folks would like to continue to think that the black-white race dynamic is the only one that counts.

If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments. I still don't know what those "tea bag" protests were about. I saw signs protesting abortion, illegal immigrants, the bank bailout and that gay guy who's going to win American Idol. But it wasn't tax day that made them crazy; it was Election Day. Because that's when Republicans became what they fear most: a minority.

When Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji demonstrated their new test for detecting biases a few years ago, many colleagues who took it refused to believe the results.But Greenwald, a University of Washington psychology professor, and Banaji, a Yale University psychology professor, tested the test, silenced the criticisms and now have broad support for a tool that can tell us some things we may not want to know.Their Implicit Association Test can be configured to look for any kind of latent prejudice.

WASHINGTON - Call it proof that progress is sometimes perverse. Meaning Eddie Jordan, district attorney for Orleans Parish in Louisiana. First black district attorney in New Orleans' history. That's the progress. Here's the perverse: Soon after he took office in January 2003, Mr. Jordan fired 53 white employees en masse and replaced them all with blacks. Last week, a federal court ruled that he committed racial discrimination against 43 of those workers. A jury of eight whites and two blacks ordered him to pay $1.9 million in back pay and damages.

"The New White Flight" was the title of an eye-opening article in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal. It was about a high school in Cupertino, Calif., where a growing Asian-American student population is causing academic standards to rise - and causing many white parents to withdraw their children from the school and some to move out of the community. The school has some of the highest test scores in the state. But although everybody is in favor of high academic standards in the abstract, not everyone is in favor of having to struggle to meet those standards.

DENVER -- Five skinheads in handcuffs appeared in court here yesterday, accused of being the latest protagonists in a series of white supremacist attacks that have marred Denver's reputation.Early on Thanksgiving Day, police said, the five white youths shouted racial epithets and then beat up a 26-year-old black woman, Shomie R. Francis, who was shopping at a 7-Eleven store."They just jumped me, simple as that," Francis, a customer service representative and a lifelong Colorado resident, said in an interview.

VIOLENCE DOESN't just happen. The cowards who bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, were convinced that they were doing what white people wanted. Not just their racist brethren in Birmingham, Ala., whose desires they knew from Klan meetings. But also others, whose silence was taken as an unspoken sign of mutual contempt for the civil-rights movement.That silence was deafening when the Freedom Riders came to town and were beaten up in 1961. The silence of the good encouraged the perpetrators of all the racial bombings that occurred in the years before the Sixteenth Street blast left four little girls dead.

Whenever an African-American man is accused of murdering two white people, the criminal justice system's ability to provide the accused a fair trial is severely tested. But when the accused is also a well-known and popular celebrity like O. J. Simpson, we begin to see a different weakness in the system: class consciousness.To this point, O. J. Simpson is getting a fair trial, perhaps the fairest trial that anyone in his situation has ever received. Unlike most other African-Americans accused of killing white people, O. J. has to feel enormous confidence in the jury that has been chosen to judge him. Historically, all-white, or predominantly white, juries have been selected in such cases and they have systematically convicted accused blacks, causing many to believe that only a racially mixed jury can guarantee an impartial verdict.

Wearing white robes and hoods, eight members of the Ku Klux Klan stood at the busy intersection of Loch Raven Boulevard and East Joppa Road yesterday afternoon, passing out literature titled "White and Proud.""It's 1998 in Towson, Maryland," said Bill Doxanas, owner of Bel-Loc Diner, who said he could see the flag-carrying KKK members from his Baynesville restaurant, east of Towson. "We've been here 25 years and never seen anything like it. People were in a state of shock and disgust."Six police cars and six officers were dispatched, but the situation remained peaceful.