Anyone catch the PBS Frontline on Lee Atwater last night? Let’s hope this election tolls the death of his legacy.

I don’t want to argue about this a lot more. My general point was that the Republican party is bleeding voters in pretty much every conceivable way (They’re losing the most educated voters, they are less appealing to women, and they are less appealing to Hispanics, the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S.) and that someone at a high level of the party should be thinking about whether another capital gains tax cut is really going to reverse these trends.

i have to come down on the side of not reading my racist ancestry into the phrase “cotton-pickin.” such affectations are regional, on top of everything else, and even if i heard my mom say it, i wouldn’t have had the historical perspective to hear it as a slur and at the age of 4–5 would have repeated it. colloquialisms are neutered over time; it goes to schooled and precise (adult) speech. what does that descriptor conjure? as a little kid, i thought of Q-tips. though grandpa might have known full well what his dad meant by it.

Abraham Lincoln made statements about blacks, which in today’s society would seem hopelessly bigoted and racist. Lincoln, however, was one of the most progressive voices on the national stage when it came to the subject of race and how likely — or unlikely — it was for blacks and whites to live as fellow countrymen and equals in a post slavery U.S.

Remember the example of Al Campanis, who was fired from his job as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers after his racially insensitive remarks on ABC’s “Nightline” April 6, 1987. I watched it live and I knew the moment that I heard those words come out of his mouth that his career in baseball was over. However, I also knew that from his perspective, Campanis’ remarks were not indicative of any hatred toward black players, merely an insensitivity that was instilled in him as part of his upbringing during a far less enlightened time. He was a teammate of Jackie Robinson’s on the Dodgers and was probably closer to Robinson than most of his other white teammates. There is every indication that he was one of the more accepting and progressive white players of his era.

My concern with the recent eruptions of racism in response to President Elect Obama is that they have come from not from people who make these utterances out of racial insensitivity, but those who do so largely from a position of obdurate intolerance and hatred.

“Like” seems to be my Kill word.

I remember, John Bloom at the hold Dallas Times Herald and his work in “We are the Weird”. I thought John was a great columnist, and a nice enough guy the few times we met, but he was out the door within days of that “satire”

Someone more savvy than I will have to find a link to the original, or maybe it has been wiped clean off the world wide interwebs.

I’m not very fond of “language policing” — but, at the same time, I think it’s a useful exercise when not taken to ridiculous extremes. It helps to raise awareness of the way that subtle, small things contribute to a larger overall trend, and the ways that we can unknowingly reinforce attitudes and beliefs that we’d otherwise condemn.

In other words, for me this is less about playing gotcha games with others, and more about self-awareness and learning sensitivity to context.