"What they did" vs "who they are"

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

The day Pops talked politics

Fifty years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle — until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong...

...“It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.

Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.

The Day Louis Armstrong Made Some Noise (New York Times, 23 September 2007)

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