Opinion: In today’s pages: Black like Obama, enhanced like Bonds (allegedly)
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Author Brian Copeland wonders why people ask Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) if he’s black enough:
if you go to the street corners of Oakland, Baltimore, Detroit, Compton or any other major urban area in the country on a given night, you’ll find guys selling crack, guys with five babies by five different women, guys headed to jail and guys just released from jail, gang bangers and pimps along with hustlers and dealers. Nobody is questioning their racial authenticity. Nobody is saying that they’re not real black men.How and when did we come to the point where black people in America are defined by the lowest common denominator? When did the bottom rung of the ladder become the expected norm, and those who strive for things greater become racial anomalies?
Reason magazine’s Jacob Sullum doesn’t think Disney’s plan to nix smoking in its movies will stop kids from lighting up. Columnist Joel Stein defends the ‘performance-enhanced’ and reveals why he hates Rosa Brooks, who writes this week about President Bush’s latest executive order on detaining terrorists.
The editorial board fears that California Republicans are becoming a rural fringe, and asks Congress to give taxpayers free access to NIH studies funded by...taxes. The board also points out that Arabs and Jews are learning separate histories in Israel.
Letter writers react to The Times’ printing op-eds by Hamas officials. While Monterey’s Patrick Frank says he’d ‘rather that people write Op-Ed articles than fire rockets or build illegal settlements,’ L.A.’s Charles S. Berdiansky thinks that ‘Hamas would have to attain the janjaweed’s genocidal success in Darfur for The Times to deny it a byline.’ Read the others here.