"Hate Whitey Day is actually one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have all the pressure to be perfect, like Christmas, or everybody getting along, like Thanksgiving. Just white people cowering in their houses/retreating to their heavily armed compounds in rural Oklahoma while America’s non-white population runs riot, more or less totally burning shit down. And the clean-up and re-building costs always add a bump to the January jobs report, as Matthew Yglesias has noted."

"Richard Alba argues that the social cleavages that separate Americans into distinct, unequal ethno-racial groups could narrow dramatically in the coming decades. During the mid-twentieth century, the dominant position of the United States in the postwar world economy led to a rapid expansion of education and labor opportunities. As a result of their newfound access to training and jobs, many ethnic and religious outsiders, among them Jews and Italians, finally gained full acceptance as members of the mainstream. Alba proposes that this large-scale assimilation of white ethnics was a result of “non–zero-sum mobility,” which he defines as the social ascent of members of disadvantaged groups that can take place without affecting the life chances of those who are already members of the established majority.

Alba shows that non–zero-sum mobility could play out positively in the future as the baby-boom generation retires, opening up the higher rungs of the labor market. Because of the changing demography of the country, many fewer whites will be coming of age than will be retiring. Hence, the opportunity exists for members of other groups to move up. However, Alba cautions, this demographic shift will only benefit disadvantaged American minorities if they are provided with access to education and training. In Blurring the Color Line, Alba explores a future in which socially mobile minorities could blur stark boundaries and gain much more control over the social expression of racial differences."

--- Surely the low-risk prediction is that Asians and Latinos will become "white", but that African Americans will remain s.o.l.?

"We start with a group of people living as slaves for 250 years... We take what should be their wages ... forbid them from marrying ... sell off their kids, some of whom are actually our kids. We forbid them to learn to read. ... We then are forced to grant them freedom, but we pass more laws ... to keep them from exercising any sort of political power ... Wide-ranging campaign of home-grown terror ... We burn down their schools ... so ardent in our enmity toward them that we actually attack education for poor whites, for fear that it may help blacks by mistake... Policies at virtually every level of government... [to keep] down the values of their homes, [keep] them from competing with us for jobs ... We do this for ... 300 hundred years. And then we develop a conscience, and for about 30 years we try to make up for what we've done, before deciding that [is] reverse racism. And then we [wonder] why ... a disproportionate share of black people can't live in a nice neighborhood."

" In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become "yellow" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race."

In which MY is correct: "Whenever I bring this up, people quickly rush to assure me that Goldwater didn’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important political issue of his time out of racism, instead at the decisive moment in his career he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists out of principled constitutional reasoning that made it impossible for him to do otherwise. But this is actually more damning. You could imagine the founder of a movement being afflicted by an unfortunate character flaw that his followers lack. But the argument is that Goldwater didn’t suffer from a character flaw. Instead, having acquired a major party presidential nomination he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important issue of the day because his sincere political ideology led to horribly wrongheaded conclusions."

"Augusta Boujey is nine years old. Her mother, who is almost white, was owned by her half-brother, named Solamon, who still retains two of her children."

On the National Review holding a symposium on black unemployment with all white symposiasts, none of them an expert on the subject: "That's fine, it's just amusing to see a magazine opposed to affirmative action exemplifying why such a policy might be needed. Rather than pick for the most qualified minds on the subject, it seems like they went with people to whom the magazine has social and ideological ties, and those people happened to all be white. It's certainly good that NRO is treating an issue like black unemployment seriously, but the symposium itself is a pretty good example of something that affects black unemployment in the real world: how black people, even those with impeccable qualifications, get overlooked based on formal and informal social networks rather than simply not being right for the job."

... in which Ta-Nehisi Coates schools the Freakonomics crowd in the concept of "sample selection bias".

...in which Coates, among much else, channels Mario Savio.

Shorter review: Q: Was Darwin motivated by anti-slavery views in formulating the theory of natural selection? A: Not as far as any evidence presented suggests, no. Nice book, though. --- I wish my harsh reviews could be as polite-yet-devastating. (Actually, I don't, but I wish that I wished that.)

I really need to read Coates's book.

Explaining the rudiments of anti-discrimination law: "The law gives employers a chance to prove that the discriminatory criteria are job-related. The idea, then, isn't to make an employer hire less qualified women or minorities over more qualified men or whites. It's to make sure the employer is testing for job qualifications, not unrelated ones."

"Then I tried to pry the grenade out of [my] dead fist with my other hand..." The LBJ quote in the first comment is great, too; that would've made for an interesting history.

... is being shaken down by the police.

How utterly despicable.
(Short version: after the hurricane, white residents of a minimally-damaged neighborhood in New Orleans form a gang - excuse me, a militia - to conduct their own little race war.)

Is this really what we look like, there?

Preach it!

Is Taibbi right? God only knows; but he's a great read.

Henry Farrell contrasts the (mathematically beautiful) Schelling model of spontaneous racial segregation with the (astoundingly ugly) reality of how it was actually violently enforced in Chicago.

"matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee"

John Judis reports on the political psychology of race. (I need to learn more about the implicit association test, because it's not clear to me what it really measures.)

About as pointed as you can get without stabbing someone.

"skin color within a conventionally defined racial group" is not correlated with political attitudes (but is correlated with other things); at least not among blacks & Latinos in the US. Weird.

Sample from Ford's new book. (_Racial Culture: A Critique_ was really good.)

Wise words from Philip Klinkner and (!) Robert Novak

Gladwell reviews Flynn

Guilt by collaboration.

William Tucker on Raymond Cattell. (There's good chapter on him in Murphy Paul's book on mental testing.)

Ah, the Pioneer Fund, that noble support of disinterested data analysis! Also: my God, Saletan doesn't even read his own magazine?