"What they did" vs "who they are"

Jay Smooth of illdoctrine.com explains how to tell someone that they said something racist and offensive:

What is black? Tell me tell me, if you think you know

Debra Dickerson recently appeared on The Colbert Report to explain why Barack Obama isn't black.

Her Salon article, which explains her central thesis, can be found here. Excerpt:

...I didn't have the heart (or the stomach) to point out the obvious: Obama isn't black.

"Black," in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can't be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won't bother to make the distinction. They're both "black" as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term.

Let's be fair: Dickerson's article, and position, is certainly a good bit more subtle and nuanced and interesting than the somewhat shocking "Obama isn't black" soundbite that she herself uses.

But the Colbert interview is quite something and should be viewed in its entirety. Without breaking character, and playing it for laughs, he slowly and systematically takes her argument apart and then smashes the pieces into... smaller pieces.

Debra Dickerson on The Colbert Report - February 8, 2007

Brown eyes good, blue eyes bad

Retired teacher Jane Elliott recalls a teaching experiment she ran with a third-grade class in an all-white school in rural Iowa, in 1968. The occasion was the assassination of Martin Luther King, and she was trying to answer her students' questions about racism.

Since I'm blue-eyed and most of the kids were blue-eyed, I first put blue-eyed people at the bottom of the hierarchy, giving them armbands and setting them apart from the brown-eyed and green-eyed kids. I told them the brown-eyed are the better people, cleaner and smarter. I wrote "melanin" on the blackboard and said it was what caused intelligence. The more you had, and the dark-eyed people had more, the smarter you were.

I told them blue-eyed people were stupid, that they sat around doing nothing, and if you gave them nice things, they wrecked them. I could feel gaps opening up in the classroom. I even said blue-eyed people had to drink from paper cups if they used the water fountain - and asked the kids why. One answered that the brown-eyed children might catch something from the blue-eyed.

Then one kid asked me: "How come you're the teacher then if you've got blue eyes?" Another piped up: "If she had brown eyes, she'd be principal or superintendent because they've both got brown eyes."...

...Years later, the now grown-up children tell me they never forgot the exercise.

But there's more. The first time I did the exercise there were seven dyslexic boys in the class, and four of them were brown-eyed. On the day the brown-eyed children were on top, they read words I knew they couldn't read and spelled words I knew they couldn't spell. I also watched the Lutheran minister's brilliant daughter fall to pieces because she just could not succeed on the day she had the wrong colour eyes. I watched the kids finding out that teachers lied to them about their abilities - and saw them decide that they were never going to live down to teachers' lies again. What stereotyping does to learning has already been studied elsewhere, but when it comes to race we don't apply it.

An unforgettable lesson, New Scientist, December 9, 2006 (subscription required)