It’s been almost 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech about dreaming of the day when blacks would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Sadly, many black political leaders still haven’t gotten his memo.
The alleged purpose of the civil rights movement was to bring about an end to racial discrimination, but the Orwellian nightmare we’ve built around race in this country requires that we pretend some racial discrimination is good, while other racial discrimination is bad.
In the county where I live, the city government of Birmingham — which includes the core older parts of the metro area, but almost none of the suburbs — is building a $60 million baseball stadium for a minor league team. In a newspaper story that came out Sunday, the mayor’s chief of staff bragged about the fact that 61 percent of the money is being contracted to minority-owned firms, suggesting that the color of the owners’ skin was a bit more important than either the content of their character or the quality of their work:
I don’t know how to fix race issues, but anger at race-baiters won’t help
My fears are less about death than about my own ‘unlived’ life
‘Citizen of the world’? Better to be sovereign than citizen of anywhere
FRIDAY FUNNIES
Starved for love: Portrait of a plastic person living a little plastic life
New command from the French state: ‘Thou shalt not say Facebook or Twitter on TV or radio’
Keep your euphemisms straight: It’s ‘patriotism,’ not ‘nationalism’
Can we find ways to separate love of home from worship of government?