Without a doubt, it is ridiculous to attribute Barack Obama's success to his blackness, as Geraldine Ferraro viciously and unabashedly did weeks ago. The man is intelligent, educated, possessed of a potent eloquence and handsome, and it makes perfect sense for him to be running for high office. Even if he were white — especially if he were white — Barack Obama would be taking primary elections around the country just as often as he is now.

Barack Obama is not going to win the Democratic nomination because he is black. But — and this is a question many politically minded people dismiss immediately — is Barack Obama winning some votes because of his skin color? And, if so, is that a bad thing?

A new article by a black female Republican seems to answer the first question in the affirmative. The second you'll have to answer yourself.

CONTINUED »

According to the US Department of Labor, the unemployment rate for black teens is six times the national average, and almost 300,000 African American kids are actively seeking low-skill jobs for the upcoming summer and beyond. But many black teens looking for work in California have been caught off guard by a harsh new reality: if you don't speak Spanish, oftentimes you aren't finding minimum-wage employment.

CONTINUED »

Since the mainstream media outlets have never really asked, we'll just take it upon ourselves to tell them: Stop going to Reverend Al Sharpton every single time you want the "African American response" to this country's racial issues.

Al Sharpton is an egomaniacal, 53-year-old, reckless Baptist who should probably be in jail right now on charges ranging from drug trafficking to tax evasion. That man does not, nor will he ever, speak for me and my family. And just because he's always getting in front of a fucking camera when tragedy strikes, you don't have to take his picture and interview him. Got it? Thanks.

An apartment complex in Roanoke, Virginia has become a battleground for a clash between African immigrants and their black American neighbors.

The primarily Somalian refugee population at Maple Grove Apartments says African Americans have been shattering their windows with rocks and covering building walls with graffiti like, "Americans Only!" The black American residents of Maple Grove claim the Africans incite the violence, especially Somali children who allegedly bully American kids. "I have a gun," said one American-born black woman. "If they hurt my kids, I'll use it."

Tracy Reyes, one of the few whites living at Maple Grove, told The Roanoke Times, "This is America; there's supposed to be a place for all of us." Scrawled in the laundry room of the building, there's a piece of graffiti that would be funny were it not so ironic and ignorant: "Go back to Africa where you belong free loaders."

In a poll conducted by British newspaper The Independent, more than 35 AIDS researches in the UK and America shared bleak news: few doctors searching for an HIV vaccine are very optimistic.

… just two were now more optimistic about the prospects for an HIV vaccine than they were a year ago; only four said they were more optimistic now than they were five years ago.

Nearly two thirds believed that an HIV vaccine will not be developed within the next 10 years and some of them said that it may take at least 20 more years of research before a vaccine can be used to protect people either from infection or the onset of Aids.

CONTINUED »

A new book we've not read about culture in the United States argues this famous paradoxical maxim: the more things change, the more they stay the same. To clarify: statistics show that millions of Americans are gradually proving that they want to live around people that look, behave and believe like them. Despite what you may think, studies say it didn't used to be like that.

Bill Bishop, the author of The Big Sort, cites one major example we imagine typifies those used throughout the book: "In 1976, less than a quarter of the American people lived in so-called 'landslide counties' – that is, counties in which the spread between the two major presidential candidates was 20 percentage points or more. By 2004, nearly half of us lived in this kind of politically tilted territory."

CONTINUED »

A new study on physicians in California shows a glaring gap between the number of doctors of color compared with the state's ethnically diverse population, especially among African Americans and Latinos. At the same time, the state has a disproportionate number of Asian and white doctors, according to the UCSF study …

The disparity is particularly alarming because minority physicians are far more likely to practice primary care medicine and work with poor or uninsured patients in rural areas, inner cities or other communities with a chronic shortage of physicians.
…
In a state with more than 35 million people, fewer than 3,300 Latino and only about 2,000 African American physicians are in "active patient care" …

This is almost as bad as DC's African American baseball player shortage!

Not to be outdone by CNN and its new documentary series about being black in America, MSNBC is airing a documentary Friday called Meeting David Wilson. It's about a young black man named David Wilson who, in the course of researching his family's history, finds the descendant of the white family that owned his ancestors. The man's name is also David Wilson.

The documentary airs Friday at 9pm, and it will be followed by a 90-minute "conversation" about race moderated by Brian Williams.