White People

CHICAGO -- The important thing about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the inflammatory former pastor of Barack Obama's church, is not that he thinks America is "controlled by rich white people," that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were the result of our "chickens are coming home to roost," or that God should "damn America" for its sins against blacks. It's that Pastor Wright is supporting a presidential candidate who clearly believes none of these things, but instead puts his faith in what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature."

You wanted to read my Michael Vick column? Sorry, that's not going to happen. Let me be clear: If Mr. Vick sponsored dogfights and brutally killed canines who did not perform, as he is alleged to have done, he's a despicable man. It wouldn't break my heart to see him caged up with a rabid dog while wearing raw sirloin strapped to his tender parts. Problem is, that's pretty much all I have to say on the subject, and there's no way to get 615 words - about the length of a column - out of that.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- When he read that the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department was looking for recruits with rugby player physiques, Emile Engelbrecht knew he fit the bill at 6-foot-4, 230 pounds. But it was another trait explicitly sought by the department's brass that made him apply to be an officer: white skin. "Maybe I am the perfect candidate at this stage," said the 31-year-old. "They saw they made a mistake, and they need us white guys to help do the work." Having gone from a white-dominated force to a black-dominated one in the 13 years since apartheid's demise, the Johannesburg police force now says the pendulum has swung too far. Much of the change occurred in the 1990s as whites left in droves, often for private security jobs, and hiring black officers became a top priority.

President Bush's nationally televised speech this week on immigration reform may have jump-started stalled negotiations in Congress, but the real action and more colorful debate took place outside the halls of the Capitol a few days earlier. Just beyond the Senate building, on a grassy knoll that is the Upper Senate Park, an assortment of like-minded demonstrators - they prefer to be called patriots - held forth on the finer details of an issue that has lately divided Americans along racial, political and ethnic lines.

Making Friends With Black People Nick Adams Kensington Publishing Corp. / 193 pages / $14 (paperback) This is how Nick Adams gets you in the door. He makes you believe you're about to read a satire on race relations titled Making Friends with Black People. The hilarious cover places Adams - a stand-up comic and former writer for BET, Oxygen and Roseanne Barr's talk show - inside the classic painting American Gothic: a hip brother holding a pitchfork and looking askance at the plain-Jane white woman standing next to him. There are sections dubbed "Terminology," "Interaction" and "Music and Culture."

MY SOUL LOOKS BACK AND WONDERS HOW I GOT OVER. - GOSPEL SONG WASHINGTON -- They recently conducted a poll in New Orleans. Gallup, USA Today and CNN asked 399 white people and 311 black ones about Hurricane Katrina's impact on their lives. As a rule, there is a numbing predictability to such surveys. They quantify the fact that blacks and whites experience and perceive life differently, which is rather like quantifying the fact that water is wet. In other words, the polls only prove the obvious.

The barber leaned close so the white folks couldn't hear. How are you adjusting to the culture shock, he asked. Takes some getting used to, I replied. We were two black men in a place - the Appalachian foothills where Ohio abuts West Virginia - that is home to very few people like us. But the culture shock he spoke of wasn't about race so much as economics. It's a strange thing, he said, still leaning close, to see white people, poor. It is strange, indeed. Not that I didn't know there are white poor.

People stare when University of Colorado student Maren Gauldin wears her "Black is Beautiful" T-shirt. That's because she's white. The shirt, Gauldin says, is like a tag that forces her to engage in conversations about race, forces her to feel a tiny bit like black and Latino students on an overwhelmingly white campus. "Every time I put it on, I feel uncomfortable," Gauldin told students at a white-privilege symposium last month that filled an auditorium and spilled into a hallway. "It helps me think about the kind of activist I want to be."

"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.

When rapper Kanye West appeared at the 1st Mariner Arena in Baltimore last month, much of his performance was noticeably absent of a word that is ubiquitous in his rap songs. For most of the show, the N-word - the actual word and not this substitute for the racial epithet - was not used. It was undoubtedly a conscious decision by Mr. West, who has admitted to feeling conflicted about using the word, and an indication of his sensitivity about its use by white people. Toward the end of the concert, however, when it came time to sing his catchy hit "Gold Digger," Mr. West announced to the white fans in the audience that it would be the only time they would be allowed to say the word.