R.I.P. Thomas A. Johnson, a pioneer in the field of journalism, died Monday in Queens at the age of 79. Johnson was the first black reporter to work at Newsday, and he went on to be the first black reporter at the New York Times. As a reporter during the 1960 in an all-white newsroom, he was called upon to both report the news and offer a perspective that no one else in the newsroom had. He won several awards for covering black servicemen in Vietnam and Europe, and is also one of the founders of Black Enterprise. [NYT]

"Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith. As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion… As most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him. His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit… Most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism."

Hot on the heels of the essays Lauren and I published Friday about our unique black experiences, today The New York Times runs "Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race". The article's interview subjects had several interesting, heartrending stories of their own:

Jenifer Bratter once wore a T-shirt in college that read “100 percent black woman.” Her African-American friends would not have it.

“I remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn’t 100 percent black,” said Ms. Bratter, 34, recalling her years at Penn State.

“I was very hurt by that,” said Ms. Bratter, whose mother is black and whose father is white.

Regardless of the fact that some people's attitudes remain stagnant, statistics show that many Americans continue to pursue interracial relationships. In 2000, the first year the Census allowed respondents to identify themselves as two or more races, six percent of the country's marriages were interracial and three percent of the population considered themselves mixed.

Good news, but it will be even better news when the United States is equalized enough to remove entirely from the Census the question of ethnicity. As James McBride, the biracial author of The Color of Water, notes, "When you’re mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is."

It's the slept-on Times piece I can't stop telling people about. A Dublin-born woman named Caroline Duggan has started an Irish dance troupe at PS 59 in the South Bronx, a school where 98 percent of the population is black or Hispanic. The kids, most of whom were attuned only to hip hop dancing or the merengue prior to Duggan's arrival, absolutely love it.

I love the story. Is it because it's yet another piece of evidence proving cultural norms can be transcended and reworked? Perhaps in part, but it's also because the kids are so damn cute.

Read everything here.

More and more Muslims are turning to home schooling to educate their children, according to a piece in today's Times. In one school district in California, 40 percent of school-aged girls of Pakistani and Southeast Asian descent are taught at home. This exodus is partly due to disgust with American institutions — "Little girls are walking around dressing like hoochies, cursing and swearing and showing disrespect toward their elders" — and partly to fear of harassment — "We don’t want anyone to point a finger at us … to say that we are bad."

Unfortunately, neither of those worries is unfounded; but is pulling their children out of school the most effective way for Muslim parents to alleviate those issues? We say no. Segregation, self-imposed or not, is terrible for diverse communities, especially when the culture being estranged is already considered by many to be insular and frightening. Besides, oftentimes struggle begets progress:

Robina Asghar, a Muslim who does social work in Stockton, Calif., says the fact that her son was repeatedly branded a “terrorist” in school hallways sharpened his interest in civil rights and inspired a dream to become a lawyer. He now attends a Catholic high school.

LEARNING TO PICK BATTLES A New York Times reporter with an odd obsession with illegal marketing campaigns came across the street team for Island Def Jam rapper (and Monica beau) Rocko stapling promotional posters to scaffolding. He started taking pictures, and when one of the men asked why, he said, "Because what you’re doing is illegal." Things went downhill from there. Long story short, the reporter got a beat down, which he details in the NYT City Room blog, his camera was demolished (although his memory card remained intact), and Rocko sold, like, no albums in his first week. The end.

"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."

If you're voting for Barack Obama, The New York Times makes a good argument for segregation today. Stay with me here. In an attempt to solve the conundrum of why Obama wins primaries in urban areas but not urban states and why Hillary Clinton wins rural areas but not rural states, writer Matt Bai posits that ethnically mixed areas have citizens who, as Bai puts it, "[are] less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so." To wit:

…in the overwhelmingly white states of Wisconsin and Vermont, for instance, [Obama] carried 54 and 60 percent of the white voters respectively, according to exit polls, while in New Jersey he won 31 percent and in Tennessee he won 26 percent. … Obama does best in areas that have either a large concentration of African-American voters or hardly any at all, but he struggles in places where the population is decidedly mixed.

The explanation, of course, is that diverse populations breed people who are wary of everyone, but in an unequal way: don't trust your neighbors, but especially don't trust them if they're not your race. Only in America could we ever owe our first black President to segregation.

At right is Eric Delgado, a senior at Bayonne High School and one of 40 finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search, the nation’s most prestigious high school science competition. Bayonne High is situated in a city where the median household income is $41,566 and only half its graduates attend college. Indeed, it's not an easy place to become a biology whiz. But, by definition, "prodigies" are as unlikely to be found in tony prep schools as they are in Bayonne High. The New York Times seems to have forgotten that fact. We suppose it's difficult to see the flowers growing in the ghetto from on high the ivory tower.

The recent spate of politically driven violence in Kenya has been not only the impetus for natives to flee, but Western tourists and all their glorious foreign currency as well. Rich white people with guns have never liked to be the hunted, and Kenya's billion-dollar tourism industry is suffering from a waning interest in its safaris and sightseeing tours after the nation's troubled elections spawned bloody unrest in December. Calvin Cottar, the owner of an upscale safari camp, assesses it succinctly in The New York Times: "People have not wanted to come to Kenya if they think 'they will be drinking Champagne while somebody is getting hacked to death over the hill.'" So true. Rebels wielding machetes really kill the mood.

Cottar's camp, a splendid plot that charges guests up to $700 a night per person, currently has not a single reservation. "If you go on safari now, you’ll be helping the country," he says, obviously forgetting that holidays for Westerners are about "R&R" – rest and relaxation – not reality.

The safari industry in Tanzania is booming and some Kenyan guides are already considering a move.

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":

CONTINUED »

"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."

CONTINUED »

Here's the problem with the media's obsession with stories about what "black voters" are going to do or how we feel (since we all do and feel the same things, obviously). Where to find a sample of people that represents all blacks? Well, thanks to its geographical location, the New York Times has an easy solution. Just go to Harlem, stand outside of a Bill Clinton's office building*, and ask the black people who walk by! That's what they did to find out how black people really felt about Bill Clinton's controversial campaign remarks, making sure to add this disclaimer:

To be sure, interviews conducted on a single day, in front of a single building, are apt to produce a narrow point of view. Yet the building, at 55 West 125th Street, is an important piece of real estate in Mr. Clinton’s world.

But when you take into account the disclaimer, what's the point of writing the story to begin with? No matter what, the casual reader would come to the conclusion that all of the black people in Harlem feel this certain way and most likely because they consider him to be an honorary black man. No wonder Bill O'Reilly gets confused when he visits.

P.S. Star Jones agrees with the NYT interviewees. And she doesn't even live in Harlem! The whole world is upside down.

*The reporter does get props for not going to a barber shop or beauty salon.

When I started saw this story in the New York Times about a Staten Island gang member of Liberian descent whose mother sent him to war-torn Liberia for four years (deep) to straighten him out, I was expecting to read an encouraging tale (minus the part when the story's subject recounts witnessing the public disembowelment of a pregnant woman) about how a young man used the lesson's learned on the streets of Staten Island and during his impossibly difficult years in Africa to improve his life. The ending was a lot less hope-filled than that. Even without an ending that ties things together in a pretty bow, the story is worth a read. [NYT]