George Fox University is a small institution in Oregon founded by Quakers. That's why the president of the school was, by all accounts, genuinely surprised and dismayed to find that a group of students there had hung a cardboard likeness of Barack Obama from a tree. A sign on the figure said "Act Six reject." Act Six is a scholarship program that brings low-income and minority students to Christian colleges in the Northwest.

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The New Republic elaborated on an interesting bit from a New York Times article today, ultimately drawing a frightening conclusion: One way people are helping Obama's cause is by widely publicizing the fact that the Illinois senator wasn't raised by blacks.

An intriguing nugget at the end of today's Times piece about the shadowy Republican group attacking Obama in Macomb County, Michigan:

Waiting in a car outside a Dollar Store here, a retired auto worker named Angie Christel, 78, who is white, said the union had dismissed for her the notion that Mr. Obama was Muslim. “I thought he was Muslim until I got the letter in the mail,” Ms. Christel said, “and he was raised by all white people.”

So the unions are sending out mailers saying Obama was raised by white people?

Here it is: the flier being distributed throughout the New Jersey suburb of Roxbury by neo-Nazi group the League of American Patriots.

The headline on the leaflet reads, "Do You Want A Black President?" and the rest of the text then rationally explains that, if Barack Obama is elected president, America will become either Haiti or South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Not a stretch at all, of course.

The floodgates are open for this bullshit with Election Day so close.

Click the image to enlarge it.

This racism is killing me inside! Yessir, the Republicans have done it again. They've gone and called Barack Obama, the well-educated, distinguished Senator running for President of the United States, "uppity."

Speaking with Politico, an anonymous (of course!) Bush insider used the tainted term while going over his keys for a McCain victory in November:

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White Democrats are racist! Their hate has cost Obama at least 6 percent of his votes! He's going to lose! That was the gist of an Associated Press story about a new poll that suggests 1/3 of Democrats don't like blacks too much. The AP's reporter behind the story, Ron Fournier, has, in the past, been accused all over the Internet and on MSNBC of being more or less in the can for John McCain, and the story on this study, which some have described as a racism push poll, has added flames to that fire. Now, surely there are plenty of Democrats who won't vote for Obama because they don't like blacks (or Muslims, even if he's not one) — we've been over this not-very-complicated idea more than once — but with Barack Obama ahead in the polls and the Bradley Effect basically disproven in primaries, it's not so much a lost cause as a major obstacle to overcome. And he's clearly overcoming it, at least for now. As many racists as there are out there, Barack Obama wouldn't have gotten anywhere near where he is without an extremely large number of white people voting for him.

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Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

Tell us about a racist incident you've experienced personally (or witnessed)? What did you do in response? Do you wish you had reacted differently?

Several attendees at the Value Voters (read: religious right) Summit over the weekend, including CNN's Lou Dobbs, were delighted by the hillllarious Obama Waffles for sale. That is, until the mainstream media picked up on the story. Suddenly, the summit's organizers realized that the Obama Waffles were a little racist and uninvited the vendors, two enterprising fellows from Tennessee.

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• Kanye West calls his new song "Love Lockdown," which he wrote a week and a half before his performance at the VMAs, his "favorite song 2 date." [MTV]

• Universal and Prince really need to let some things on YouTube go. [EUR]

• If young guys are going to get arrested for sagging, then this is fair game. [Jossip]

• Jordin Sparks knows that people who don't wear purity rings aren't "necessarily sluts," but she meant what she said at the VMAs and she isn't sorry. [EW]

• All right, Georgia politicians. I'll say it slowly. Stop. Calling. Black. People. Uppity. [TPM]

Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

Many old movies that are considered classics were made when racism was the accepted norm and non-white characters usually embodied negative racial and ethnic stereotypes (uh… even more so than in contemporary movies, I mean). Many of these movies — think Gone with the Wind, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Birth of a Nation, which is an important part of cinema history but one of the most racist films ever made — reflect those attitudes and stereotypes. Recently, a planned public screening of Breakfast at Tiffany's in Sacramento sparked protests from the Asian-American community. How do we deal with these films? Should we not watch them, screen them, or show them to our kids? Should they be sold with disclaimers? Or are people smart enough not to get sucked into attitudes of the past in the two hours it takes to watch a film?

British Photographer Nick Knight was mad as hell about the racism he saw in the fashion industry, and he wasn't going to take it anymore. So he enlisted enlisted Naomi Campbell and some prop (I hope!) guns to illustrate the frustration that he and black models feel every day in a silent short film. Campbell's wearing two dresses by Rodarte in the clip. Incidentally, Rodarte scored a big fat zero in Stereohyped's "Black Model Watch" from NYC's fall fashion week.

We all know violent sexpot New York has no respect for herself – really, how could she? – but had you any idea how little she cares for the feelings of others?

In the newest episode of televised pockmark New York Goes to Hollywood, Pollard attempts to research Japanese culture for an upcoming commercial role. Of course, she goes about this not by heading to the library for The Book of Five Rings or scouring Wikipedia, but by asking every Asian person she sees if they can explain Japan. (To a Korean dry cleaner: "Is that the same as being Japanese, or, like, not at all?")

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