It was business as usual at a Barack Obama town hall meeting in St. Petersburg, Fl, today, until hecklers in the audience stood up and started yelling at the senator. The hecklers, who were from a "Pan-African socialist group" called Uhuru Nation, stood up during Obama's speech and waved a banner that said "What about the black community, Obama?" They then called him to task, for, as they saw it, ignoring Sean Bell, the Jena Six, subprime mortgages, and the black community as a whole.

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When we talk about black people and AIDS, our minds often shift to Africa, where the AIDS epidemic has completely destroyed communities and left generations of orphans. A new report from the Black AIDS Institute says that we should also be paying close attention to AIDS in the black American community. According "Left Behind - Black America: A Neglected Priority in the Global AIDS," the number of African Americans with AIDS is comparable to the numbers in some African countries.

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Black people aren't all the same! It's not news to us, of course, but the results of a study commissioned by black-owned Radio One should at least cause some in the media to question their decisions to portray blacks (and other racial minorities, while we're at it) as a monolithic group. Radio One CEO Catherine Hughes commissioned the study because, she said, "There's a difference (between) articulating that we're not a monolithic community and quantifying it. We really needed to take a snapshot of the black community with all of its textures and nuances and debunk the myth. … We wanted to quantify and qualify the incredible diversity in our community."

The study, for which black Americans ages 13-74 were surveyed, found "11 distinct segments" within black American. These segments include "'connected black teens' who are tech-savvy, optimistic and less familiar with the overt bigotry of the past; 'stretched black straddlers,' who excessively worry about everything from relationships to money; and the affluent 'new middle class' who are most likely to believe that challenges within black communities can best be solved by blacks."

Sometimes it seems like these sorts of studies are so common sense that they're a waste of money and time. But that's until you think about how often so many people forget — or never knew — the generational, cultural, socio-economical, and regional factors that differentiate black people in this country, even as a shared skin color and history bring us together.

What are some of the study's other findings?

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"I shuddered only once while watching Barack Obama’s speech last Tuesday," Bill Kristol says today in the lede of his Times article, "Let's Not, and Say We Did," which argues against the necessity of the momentous speech on race Senator Obama delivered last week. Ironically, I shuddered throughout Kristol's article, with the hardest convulsions happening here: "The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race. … A new national conversation about race isn’t necessary to end what Obama calls the 'racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years' — because we’re not stuck in such a stalemate."

Perhaps Kristol is right. According to the National Urban League's most recent report, black Americans continue to trail whites in income, education and health. That's not so much a "stalemate" as it is "losing."

• Here's some footage from the opening night of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

• Black farmers work to keep their land in SC. [USAT]

• Barack Obama answers Hillary Clinton's suggestion that he'd make a great VP: "I’m not running for vice president. I’m running for president of the United States of America." [TC]

• Ghanaian soccer star Freddy Adu is 18 and ready for the Olympics. [NYT]

• "FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME: BLACKS ALREADY TURN OUT AT HIGH RATES AND VOTE OVERWHELMINGLY DEMOCRATIC IN THE SOUTH." [TAP]

It took an entire UN committee months to reach a conclusion they could have come up with after a couple hours spent with a decent newspaper: blacks and poor people often get left behind by circuitous government bureaucracy in the United States.

A United Nations treaty committee ruled Friday that the United States' response to Hurricane Katrina has had a greater negative impact on displaced black residents and called on the federal government to do more to guarantee that they can return to affordable housing in their hometowns.

The U.N. committee also ruled Friday that the U.S. government must make sure displaced residents have a greater say in plans that affect their return.

New Orleans housing authorities are calling the ruling a victory over the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has for years now been attempting to move forward with a dandified plan to destroy four large projects and replace them with prettier, mixed-income buildings with less units. HUD reps argue that, by demolishing the public housing, they'll also be demolishing the "concentrated poverty" plaguing New Orleans. And they say offering less units than before isn't a problem, because surveys show that most displaced NOLA project residents don't want to return, leaving room for plenty of rich white people.

A report from John Fernandez, a professor of architecture from MIT, says leveling the projects would be an unwise decision, as they are "safer, stronger and cheaper to rehabilitate and bring up to code than building new stick-built units." Fernandez hasn't yet commented on the counterpoint, "But they're unsightly!"

An interesting and convincing letter regarding KA Dilday's article "Go Back to Black" ran Monday in the New York Times. Its author, a black Times reader named Lee May, speaks of a childhood spent in 1950s Mississippi, a difficult history that all but guarantees wisdom. And wise May is. Here's her (his?) argument against Dilday's recommendation that African American's embrace the term "black," and her solution to the vexatious "name game":

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We did it, you guys! It took a couple hundred years and a whole lot of broken promises from federal, state and local governments, but, finally, one out of every 100 adults in the United States is in a correctional facility.

The federal prison population swelled to 1.6 million last year. Add to that the 723,000 criminals housed in local jails, and that's one whole percent of the nation's adult population that goes to sleep behind bars. And, of course, this: "Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups." Can you guess to which "groups" the New York Times is referring? I think you can.

One in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is imprisoned in some way (and that's not counting mentally). The rate of black women between the ages of 35 and 39 who are serving time is in lockstep with the national rate, one in 100, but that percentage drops to one in 355 for white women of the same age.

The researchers behind this data – like many, many of their contemporaries – say it's high time America's criminal justice system seeks other options to treat nonviolent offenders, specifically those whose crimes involve drugs and alcohol (DUI, marijuana possession, etc).

Conclusion: This is hardly anything new, unfortunately. The amount of information suggesting that our prisons are careening out of control seems to be directly proportional to their growth rate, and nothing's changing. To quote Mugatu: "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"

"Someone, I think it was Jesse Jackson, in the days when he had that kind of clout, managed to convince America that I preferred being African-American. I don’t," writes black journalist KA Dilday in today's New York Times. Dilday, whose writing lets us know is American but whom we had to google to discover was female, says that, regardless of where she has gone in the world, she's been cottoned to by people of color. And not just those with recent ties to Africa. "Everywhere I travel," she says, "from North Africa to Europe to Asia, dark-skinned people approach me and, usually gently but sometimes aggressively, establish a bond."

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While most statistical reports about the state of black America are completely depressing — enough so that John Edwards actually thought it made sense to say that soon all black men will be in jail or dead — there are some positive advances to temper the hopelessness caused by grim reports like the Urban Leagues annual "State of Black America" report. According to the Washington Post's Courtland Milloy:

A sharp drop in teen pregnancy in the Washington area has been especially steep among African American girls. The nation's black teens now have lower rates of tobacco, drug and alcohol use than their peers. The number of black students graduating from the nation's high schools and going on to college continues to rise.

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