Below are Traina’s most damning tweets about black people and Trayvon Martin:

We are faced with a young Black Army of Thugs who have declared War on the American Way of Life-Holding America Hostage as we speak!

— Mark A. Traina (@MarkATraina) January 14, 2012

Young Black Thugs have created an atmosphere of Fear throughout America. The Real Terrorist live among us! Not over seas! Right here and now

— Mark A. Traina (@MarkATraina) January 14, 2012

Protesters march in Florida town where Trayvon Martin was shot: Black people need to STOP shooting one another! mark a. traina

— Mark A. Traina (@MarkATraina) April 1, 2012

But Traina’s opinions go even further than personal hatred for black youth. On his Twitter account, he goes into his politics, wondering, “Can President Obama win re-election if almost two-thirds of whites are opposed to him?” He has also voiced strong support for Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace, Colorlines reports:

In another tweet about the Republican presidential primaries in March, Traina wrote, “I grew up in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana – I am a Wallace Man at Heart!”

“It’s particularly alarming to have someone who works for the school system in a position of authority be pro-segregation,” Eden Heilman, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center told NOLA.com, referring to Traina’s remark about George Wallace, segregationist governor of Alabama.

The Jefferson Parish School Board is already investigating Traina’s tweets.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus

Rather than denounce the proposal or the dangers of having a small group of rich outside donors and corporations free to spend as much as they want to influence elections, Priebus blamed Obama.

After lamenting that Romney and his party had to spend a day and a half dealing with the fallout from the Super PAC proposal, Priebus told Crowley:

I know how it works. It’s the Democrats and Barack Obama that want the story out there. He wants the story to play out in the media, because for every day that [Obama adviser] David Axelrod and this President don’t have to talk about their broken promises when it comes to jobs, the debt, and the deficit — the more time they can talk about hypotheticals that may or may not come true — is a day they want to win on. So, look, this president’s got a bigger problem and his problem is no matter what he puts out there, no matter what distractions he puts out there, he can’t change the truth and escape the reality of where we are in this American economy. And it’s no good.

Watch the video:

It was, of course, actually a Republican strategist with a long history of race-baiting ads who proposed these attack ads for a Super PAC led by a billionaire determined to defeat President Obama’s re-election.

And it was Mitt Romney who, back in February, made similar attacks on President Obama saying: “I don’t know what is worse, him listening to Rev. Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation.” When asked this week about the comments, Romney told reporters “I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” This, of course, the same Romney who repudiated the Super PAC proposal as “character assassination.”

Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on new census data which showed, for the first time, that non-white births made up over 50 percent of all births in the United States last year.

It marked an important milestone, indicative of a changing United States that has long been considered the world’s melting pot. Or, if you’re the conservative, Phyllis Schlafly-backed Eagle Forum, it’s a clarion call that America is in grave danger of being overrun by uneducated, un-American brown people:

It is not a good thing. The immigrants do not share American values, so it is a good bet that they will not be voting Republican when they start voting in large numbers.
[...]
Instead, the USA is being transformed by immigrants who do not share those values, and who have high rates of illiteracy, illegitimacy, and gang crime, and they will vote Democrat when the Democrats promise them more food stamps.

Setting aside for a minute the offensive way in which the Eagle Forum dismisses all of “the immigrants” as thoughtless criminals, it’s telling that The Eagle Forum views this as simply a political problem. The Eagle Forum’s political allies have long insisted on treating immigrants as second-class citizens, and rather than pivot their policy proposals to better accommodate the nation’s shifting demographics, the group seems instead to want to curb minorities’ procreation.

The Eagle Forum doesn’t dwell on the fringes of the conservative movement either. The group still wields considerable influence in conservative circles, and has achieved more than a few legislative victories, like derailing the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and staunchly opposing bills aimed at protecting a women’s right to choose.

The post goes on to accuse immigrants — and, for reasons passing understanding, The New York Times for reporting on this — of seeking to “destroy the American family,” arguing that immigrants do not share American values. Of course, this is hardly the first time The Eagle Foundation has pushed xenophobia.

Watch it:

Despite the video and expert testimony that “Blomberg’s actions were ‘objectively unreasonable’ and were ‘contrary to any legitimate police action,’” an all-white, six member jury acquitted Blomberg on Wednesday. Blomberg was the first of four officers who were fired by the Houston police department over the incident to face trial trial for official oppression, which carries a penalty of up to one year in jail. Blomberg claimed to being using his foot to “sweep” not stomp Holley after Holley failed to put his hands behind his back. Jurors in the case told Blomberg’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin, that prosecutors had failed to prove that Blomberg had acted unreasonably.

The acquittal came after another white officer was accquitted of wrongdoing in the shooting of African-American Robert Tolan in the driveway of his home last year, and members of the local community are outraged at the outcome:

“The jury sent a message that the life of a black man don’t mean a damn thing in Houston,” African-American community activist Quanell X told the Los Angeles Times. “I believe the prosecutor never truly intended to convict this cop. I believe that allowing an all-white jury to be impaneled in this case was absolutely wrong and a miscarriage of justice.” …

“Black people must rise up and send a message to white people in this city and this town that our lives and the lives of our children do matter,” Quanell X told the Times. “We’re at a boiling point where America is headed toward some real civil conflict because of cases like Trayvon Martin and Robbie Tolan and Chad Holley. Black people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

The community responded to the outcome by holding a protest in downtown Houston on Thursday. The protest started with three dozen people but the crowd grew to about 300.

Both Houston Mayor Annise Parker and Harris County District Attorney agree with protesters that the verdict in the case was incorrect. Mayor Parker told a news conference that none of the officers who were fired over the incident will ever be Houston police officers again regardless of the outcome of their trials. State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, also disagreed with the verdict and has called for a complete review of the Houston criminal justice system, stating that “[a]n officer of the law simply cannot be above the law.”

Three other officers await trial for their part in the incident. Drew Ryser is charged with official oppression and Phillip Bryan and Raad Hassan are both charged with official oppression and violating the civil rights of a prisoner.

–Alex Brown

GOP Strategist Fred Davis

The Times obtained a proposal, crafted by race-baiting GOP media consultant Fred Davis, that says the group will go after Obama for his relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor who has come under fire for controversial race-related comments.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) steered clear of these attacks during the 2008 election — even suspending a staffer who tweeted out a Wright video — much to the chagrin of Davis and his associates, who include Chicago Cubs owner/ TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.

Davis’s proposal makes clear that no holds will be barred this time around, and that Rev. Wright will be prominently featured. According to the article, the group is seeking as “a spokesman an ‘extremely literate conservative African-American’ who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a ‘metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.’”

Davis, it turns out, has a long history of making ads that evoke racism, xenophobia, or general aversions to anything “other” or “different.” Here are his top three ads in that vein:

Alabama’s English-Only Governor: Fred Davis helped with Tim James’s gubernatorial bid, during which he ran this dog-whistle xenophobic, racist ad.

Debbie Spend-It-Now: This racist ad aired during the Superbowl this year. It shows a woman of Asian-American descent speaking in broken English. The actress in the spot actually issued an apology to her friends and family for any pain her role in the hateful ad may have caused.

“There Is No God”: When Elizabeth Dole went after Kay Hagan in the 2008 race for North Carolina’s Senate seat, she went all in on attacking Hagan. This particularly vicious ad depicts Hagan as an athiest who takes “godless money.” Kay Hagan actually sued Dole for defamation over the ad.

In the end, all of these candidates lost. Americans are smarter than to fall for race-baiting tricks from political operatives, even if one of Davis’s associates thinks that “if the nation had seen [Davis's proposed Jeremiah Wright] ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

Other Davis ads also include Carly Fiorina’s “Demon Sheep” and Christine O’Donnell’s “I Am Not A Witch.”

Kendrec McDade

Nineteen-year-old Kendrec McDade was shot at point-blank range by one Pasadena police officer and handcuffed after being struck by a total of seven bullets, according to the autopsy report released Friday by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. . . . Three of the wounds — two in his abdomen and one in his right arm — are considered potentially fatal because they lacerated arteries, according to Pasadena police. One bullet entered through the back of the right arm and another the back of the right forearm.

McDade, of Azusa, was killed when Pasadena officers Jeff Newlen and Mathew Griffin responded to a report of an armed robbery at a taco truck in northwest Pasadena. One of the officers pursued him on foot and the other from his police cruiser.

The first officer who fired did so while seated in the patrol car as McDade approached with his hand at his waistband. McDade and the officer were “within a foot” of each other, according to the autopsy report.

It is not yet clear whether McDade was actually involved in the taco truck robbery or if he was merely a bystander. It is clear, however, that the police who shot McDade did so under a cloud of false information. McDade was not armed, and the alleged theft victim later admitted that he lied about his assailants having weapons in order to provoke a faster response by police.

McDade also does not fit the profile of the kind of person who would normally commit armed robbery. He has no gang ties or prior arrests, was a star football player in high school, and was a student at Citrus College at the time of his death.

John Derbyshire

Derbyshire, however, appears to have learned nothing from his high-profile firing. In a column for the white nationalist site VDARE.com, Derbyshire offers unqualified praise for white supremacy:

The enemies of conservatism are eager to supply their own nomenclature. “White Supremacist” seems to be their current favorite. It is meant maliciously, of course, to bring up images of fire-hoses, attack dogs, pick handles, and segregated lunch counters—to imply that conservatives, especially non-mainstream conservatives, are cruel people with dark thoughts.

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.

As a reminder, this man who now openly praises a racial caste system wrote for one of the nation’s top conservative publications for nearly 12 years.

1. Forcing Women To Sleep In Their Own Menstrual Blood: In Arpaio’s jails, “female Latina LEP prisoners have been denied basic sanitary items. In some instances, female Latina LEP prisoners have been forced to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation because of MCSO’s failure to ensure that detention officers provide language assistance in such circumstances.”
2. Assaulting Pregnant Women: “[A]n MCSO officer stopped a Latina woman – a citizen of the United States and five months pregnant at the time – as she pulled into her driveway. After she exited her car, the officer then insisted that she sit on the hood of the car. When she refused, the officer grabbed her arms, pulled them behind her back, and slammed her, stomach first, into the vehicle three times. He then dragged her to the patrol car and shoved her into the backseat. He left her in the patrol car for approximately 30 minutes without air conditioning. The MCSO officer ultimately issued a citation for failure to provide identification.”
3. Stalking Latina Women: “In another instance, during a crime suppression operation, two MCSO officers followed a Latina woman, a citizen of the United States, for a quarter of a mile to her home. The officers did not turn on their emergency lights, but insisted that the woman remain in her car when she attempted to exit the car and enter her home. The officers’ stated reasons for approaching the woman was a non-functioning license plate light. When the woman attempted to enter her home, the officers used force to take her to the ground, kneed her in the back, and handcuffed her. The woman was then taken to an MCSO substation, cited for ‘disorderly conduct,’ and returned home. The disorderly conduct citation was subsequently dismissed.”
4. Criminalizing Being A Latino: “During raids, [Arpaio's Criminal Enforcement Squad] typically seizes all Latinos present, whether they are listed on the warrant or not. For example, in one raid CES had a search warrant for 67 people, yet 109 people were detained. Fifty-nine people were arrested and 50 held for several hours before they were released. Those detained, but not on the warrant, were seized because they were Latino and present at the time of the raid. No legal justification existed for their detention.”
5. Criminalizing Living Next To The Wrong People: “[D]uring a raid of a house suspected of containing human smugglers and their victims . . . officers went to an adjacent house, which was occupied by a Latino family. The officers entered the adjacent house and searched it, without a warrant and without the residents’ knowing consent. Although they found no evidence of criminal activity, after the search was over, the officers zip-tied the residents, a Latino man, a legal permanent resident of the United States, and his 12-year-old Latino son, a citizen of the United States, and required them to sit on the sidewalk for more than one hour, along with approximately 10 persons who had been seized from the target house, before being released.”
6. Ignoring Rape: Because of Arpaio’s obsessive focus on “low-level immigration offenses” his officers failed “to adequately respond to reports of sexual violence, including allegations of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse of girls.”
7. Widespread Use Of Racial Slurs: “MCSO personnel responsible for prisoners held in MCSO jails routinely direct racial slurs toward Latino prisoners, including calling Latino prisoners ‘paisas,’ ‘wetbacks,’ ‘Mexican bitches,’ ‘fucking Mexicans,’ and ‘stupid Mexicans.’”
8. Widespread Racial Profiling: “[I]n the southwest portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are almost four times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct. . . . In the northwest portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are over seven times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct. . . . Most strikingly, in the northeast portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are nearly nine times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct.”
9. Random, Unlawful Detention Of Latinos: “MCSO officers stopped a car carrying four Latino men, although the car was not violating any traffic laws. The MCSO officers ordered the men out of the car, zip-tied them, and made them sit on the curb for an hour before releasing all of them. The only reason given for the stop was that the men’s car ‘was a little low,’ which is not a criminal or traffic violation.”
10. Group Punishments For Latinos: “In some instances, when a Latino [Low English Proficiency] prisoner has been unable to understand commands given in English, MCSO detention officers have put an entire area of the jail in lockdown—effectively preventing all the prisoners in that area from accessing a number of privileges because of the Latino LEP prisoner’s inability to understand English, inciting hostility toward the LEP prisoner, and potentially placing MCSO officers and other prisoners in harm’s way.”

I’m glad we’re going to be having this conversation on the day that Lena Dunham finally speaks up about the criticisms of the show’s approach to diversity in a long interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. On the question of the core cast, she says:

I wrote the first season primarily by myself, and I co-wrote a few episodes. But I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, ‘I hear this and I want to respond to it.’ And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.

I think this is precisely the kind of attitude that both comes from a place of deep respect and concern about speaking for others, and can end up being deeply limiting for a writer. It’s a very complex path to walk between avoiding appropriating someone else’s life experience and treating that life experience as if it’s so potentially different that you couldn’t possibly understand any aspect of it. Respectful difference, taken too far, can get a little fetishistic. I’m not saying that’s what Dunham is doing here, but it’s definitely a dynamic that I think could lead to white writers feeling hesitant to write characters of color.

According to new data by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, however, most judges are not extending this opportunity to minorities:

The decrease for African-American clerks between fiscal years 2006 and 2010 was most pronounced, with a decline from 3.5 percent of appellate level clerks in 2006 to 2.4 percent in 2010, the new report states. The number of Hispanic appellate level clerks dropped from 3.1 percent to 2 percent during the same period.

At the district court level, the percentage of African-American clerks declined from 3.5 percent to 3.2 percent, while Hispanic clerks remained steady at 3.3 percent.

This latest breakdown of law clerks by race shows African-Americans fill fewer of those spots now than they did in 2000.

Federal judges obviously wield enormous power. They have broad discretion to decide how many years a person will spend in prison. They can breathe life into essential protections for workers and consumers — or invent new ways to immunize corporations from the law. And they can shape how our Constitution itself is understood. Among other things, it is very unlikely that the frivolous constitutional argument against the Affordable Care Act would have picked up any steam if two federal district court judges had not handed down opinions legitimizing this view.

Yet a judge’s power to shape the legal profession by hiring law clerks should not be neglected as an exercise of power. When judges hire minority clerks, they welcome these lawyers into the highest eschelons of a profession that remains dominated by white attorneys. Nor is the impact of this power limited to racial diversity. When a federal judiciary that remains dominated by Republican appointees disproportionately doles out elite clerkships to conservative lawyers, it shifts the upper reaches of the legal profession rightward.

Now, I get that the list is supposed to be funny. The article has a subhead that signals that intent loud and clear: “By use of deductive reasoning, I have concluded that Asians are the superior race. This is scientific proof.” But as with the awful Ashton Kutcher PopChips ad we discussed earlier today, in which the actor appears in brownface to play a stereotypical Indian single man, this is an attempt at humor that has nothing to say about race, or about racists, and elicits nary a chuckle.

It might be one thing if the list was full of stereotypes or things that were so blatantly untrue that the article was an attempt to parody ridiculous things racist people believe about Asians. Instead, it’s a recitation of common-to-the-point of boring statements: everything is cuter! they’re weird in ways that white folks find laughable but not contemptible! they’re a source of memes for Western audiences! This isn’t a parody of a mindset: it’s an investment in it. (Also, the piece seems to believe that, a single banh mi reference aside, “Asian” mostly means Chinese and Japanese.) This isn’t actually a list about the superiority of any given Asian country or any given Asian culture. It’s not a Tiger Mother argument. It’s about the fact that white people find some cultural practices that originate in Asian countries more entertaining to consume than, say, the sight of middle-aged dudes in Lederhosen. It’s a joke about superiority that ends up reinforcing a sense that people from Asian countries are inferior, that these cultural practices are worthy objects only of amusement rather than actual interaction.

What worked about BuzzFeed’s lists of Tweets and comments is that they were intended to spotlight the ridiculousness of racist and homphobic statements. Somewhere along BuzzFeed’s edit chain, that purpose seems to have gotten lost, while the form and subject matter stayed on. Style and subject tend to drive traffic. But purpose ought to determine what’s worth publishing, and which pitches are worth rejecting as fast as possible. Especially when the evidence is clear that you can garner as many clicks and as much attention for doing something worthwhile as for ginning up controversy.

Neo-Nazi Shooter J.T. Ready and Former State Sen. Russell Pearce (R-AZ)

Ready’s beliefs were extreme even among extremists. In 2007, for example, he wrote that illegal immigration occurs because “negroids screw monkeys and rape babies in afreaka [sic]. Then stupid white man who licks kosher jew rear lets negroids in.” Yet Ready traveled surprisingly close to the center of power in his state. Ready claims he was a protégé to former Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce (R), the author of Arizona’s harsh immigration law who was recently removed from office in a recall election, and there is ample documentation that the two men knew each other and that Pearce once supported Ready politically.

Pearce and Ready’s relationship stretches back at least to 2004, when Pearce ordained Ready as an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. By 2006, when Ready ran for Mesa City Council — a campaign that sputtered after the public learned that Ready was once court-martialed and kicked out of the Marine Corps — he received Pearce’s endorsement. Ready also claims that he was with Pearce’s son Josh when Josh Pearce got a tattoo of an iron eagle with a swastika on his neck and chest, but that he also talked Josh out of joining a skinhead group.

Pearce later tried to distance himself from Ready, but Ready insisted as recently as last year that Pearce was a seminal figure in his life. In an interview with a local Fox station, Ready called Pearce “a surrogate father” who “enlightened him,” that they spent time together at Pearce’s cabin, and that they were “around each other quite a bit.” In the same local news segment, Pearce admits that he had an association with Ready, but denies that it was as close as Ready suggests. Watch it:

Ready is dead, and Pearce obviously has an interest in downplaying his relationship with Ready if a deep bond did once exist between the men. So it may never be known with certainty whether Pearce was the father figure Ready claims he was. Ready, however, does admit to one divide between him and the former Arizona senator. He claims that Pearce taught him to stay “more covert” for “long term strategy aims,” but Ready ultimately chose to ignore this advice.

Jodie and Peter Brunstetter

Jodie Brunstetter, the wife of North Carolina state Sen. Peter Brunstetter, made the remarks “outside the early voting site at the Forsyth County Government Center in downtown Winston-Salem” while speaking to voters, Chad Nance, a Winston-Salem freelance journalist, reports. Nance heard about Jodie’s comments from an African-American poll worker who allegedly overheard Brunstetter say, “The reason my husband wrote Amendment 1 was because the Caucasian race is diminishing and we need to uh, reproduce.”

Asked to clarify her statement, Brunstetter reluctantly confirmed that she did in fact use the phrase “Caucasian”:

BRUNSTETTER: [P]eople who founded the United states wrote a Constitution and it has been what has preserved this society. And we were just talking about lots of different things which the gentleman was turning around.

NANCE: You didn’t tell that one lady that it was to preserve the Caucasian race, because they were becoming a minority? That’s what an old lady down the block told us.

BRUNSTETTER: No, no.

NANCE: You didn’t say that? She’s lying?

BRUNSTETTER: No. It’s just that same sex marriages are not having children. [...]

NANCE: You didn’t say anything about Caucasians?

BRUNSTETTER: I probably said the word.

NANCE: In reference to….? You didn’t tell her anything about Caucasians? …

BRUNSTETTER: Right now I am a little confused myself because there has been confusion here today about this amendment, where it is very simple. The opponents are saying things that are not true and so there has been a lot of conversation going back and forth…. Right now I have some heat stroke going on. I’m not quite sure now. Because there has been lots of confusion.

NANCE: So you did or did not say anything about Caucasians?

BRUNSTETTER: If I did it wasn’t anything race related.

Watch it:

Responding to his wife’s comments, Sen. Brunstetter told ThinkProgress, “I know my wife does not think like that,” but admitted that “She got very flustered (she is not a political person) and then someone came up to her and started shooting questions at her. She noticed later that there was someone video taping without her knowledge.”

“My wife is one of the sweetest, most genuine people you will ever meet,” he added. “Her convictions on the marriage amendment are spiritual in nature, not racial. The individual in question had been quite abusive and intimidating. The Amendment is not racially motivated, is quite simple and straightforward and, in fact, is widely supported in many areas of the African American community.”

Jodie told the Winston-Salem Journal, “I seriously don’t remember.” “There was quite a bit of conversation … the reasons for the amendment is for there to be marriage between a man and a woman and it does not matter what race.”

Amendment 1, which goes to a vote on May 8, has already divided the African American community between leaders who argue that the Bible prohibits homosexual behavior and those who maintain that religious interpretations should not influence civil laws. The comments by Mrs. Brunstetter will likely interject more racial division into the debate.

For ThinkProgress’ full coverage of Amendment 1, click here.

Speaking at a town hall in Wheeling, Illinois on Sunday, Walsh gave his view on how to win the upcoming presidential election before launching into his take on the previous one. The House Republican said the country only voted for Obama because “he was a historic figure… our first African-American president.” Walsh noted that other factors helped, including McCain’s age, but argued that Obama “never would have gotten there without his historic nature.”

WALSH: He was a historic figure. He’s our first African-American president. The country voted for him because of that. It made us feel good about [our]self. I’ve said it before, it helped that John McCain was about 142 years old. It helped that the economy was tanking. A lot of these things helped. But he never would have gotten there without his historic nature.

Watch it:

To say that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama benefited from latent prejudices is absurd.

Yet Walsh is using this view to undermine the president’s legitimacy and argue that he was elected not on his merits, but because of his race. Earlier in the town hall, Walsh criticized Obama for not being able to “understand this stuff” (speaking about government spending) because “he was an accidental president.”

Still, Walsh isn’t the only one to espouse this worldview. A recent survey found that “white Americans feel they are more discriminated against than blacks.”

The movie follows a series of friends who happen to represent helpfully-delineated archetypes, and the women they begin to fall for. Cedric (Kevin Hart) is divorcing, a prospect he insists makes him happy, but is actually the source of incredible misery. Zeke (Romany Malco), a former musicians and a consumate player (he irritates his friends by making omelettes shirtless, which in his case would be a killer morning-after move for a lucky lady) meets Mya (Meagan Good), who is fresh out of a series of hookups with an utter creep played by Chris Brown, and intends to stay celibate until she knows that Zeke is serious about her. Dominic (Michael Ealy), an aspiring chef, begins dating Lauren (Taraji P. Henson), a successful career woman and the movie’s worst stereotype. Jeremy (Jerry Ferrara) is happily nesting with Kristen (Gabriel Union, who should play a sometime-stoned semi-nerd more often), forgetting to move forward in his career and decorating like he raided the set of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And mama’s boy Michael (Terrence Jenkins) begins dating single mother Candace (Regina Hall).

There’s also a white character called Bennett, who isn’t featured in any of the movie’s trailers or posters. A happily married man, he hangs out with the main characters at their favorite bar, plays in their thrice-weekly basketball game, observes their romantic travails with tolerant amusement, and periodically dispenses clarifying advice. In other words, he’s a token white friend, a character who serves the same genuinely functional function as sassy black friends and wise black men. Because Bennett’s comfortable watching Oprah (a confession that prompts Cedric to warn him “You gotta say no homo when you say shit like that at a divorce party,” in one of several moments of minor, but sadly realistic-feeling homophobia), which means unlike the men he’s hanging out in a party van with, he’s able to figure out that their girlfriends are relying on Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man for romantic advice. And when Bennett explains, without disclaimer, shame or insecurity that he’s leaving the bar to go home to cook dinner for his wife because, shocker of shockers, he enjoys doing it, it’s a catalyst for the rest of his friends to get their acts together.

He’s also the whitest point on the movie’s continuum, and an illustration of something that Think Like a Man does that almost never happens in Hollywood: the majority of its main characters may be black, but their challenges aren’t what the movie world thinks of as specifically African-American problems, nor is race generally a verboten conversation in this mixed-race friend group. Happy Endings may have Brad escape from his core group of white friends occasionally to spend time with his black friends, and on How I Met Your Mother, race only comes up when Lily’s black friend swings by the bar for an evening. But in Think Like a Man, race is one of a number of lenses the core group of men use to negotiate the issues they’re discussing.

When Jeremy (Jerry Ferrara), suggests that Cedric’s wife is abusing him, Cedric complains “Look at the white man trying to make light of the relationship issues of the black man.” When the subject of whiteness comes up in another conversation, Jeremy suggests that “You’re not even white, Bennett. You’re clear.” It’s less a matter of Jeremy asserting credibility than explaining a difference in their styles. And later, when Jeremy bemoans the fact that his girlfriend Kristen (Gabrielle Union, who should play stoned more often) has deep-sixed the couch he rescued from a dumpster when they were in college, his friends decry his refusal to decorate, telling him “You had that couch since college? That’s some white boy shit.” When they go on to delineate the black equivalent—going into debt to buy a living room set—and Bennett moves a bit too quickly to affirm the stereotype, the movie doesn’t make it a huge incident, but rather makes it clear that his comments were awkward and that the group is close enough to accomodate the occasional verbal misstep. (In an interesting bit of class dynamics, Michael’s smothering mother interrogates Candace about the father of her son: “Is he incarcerated? I know how you people run around.”)

These conversations feel real, or as close to it as mass-market Hollywood is capable of, and so do those between the men and women, particularly Jeremy and Kristen. “I’m one of the boys except I have a vagina. I swear, Frodo Baggins had it easier,” Kristen complains to her partner in their real estate business about the rut she and Jeremy have fallen into. Later, when Jeremy tells her that rather than redecorating, “I’d rather watch Letters to Juliet with you again,” she slaps back at him “I know you would. Because you cried at the end when they got reunited.” When Kristen, after she and Jeremy have ended a lazy evening with a couple of bong hits between them, tries to talk to him about their future, Jeremy thinks she’s talking about something else. “I don’t know if we’ll be flying around in hovercrafts. But there will be droids. I think there’ll be droids. There better be droids,” he muses. Zeke and Mya have a nice chemistry, too—it’s nice to watch a romantic comedy where most if not all of the couples have some genuine heat. While Zeke initially complained about staying up all night talking about Plato’s allegory of the cave with Maya instead of having sex with her (his friends assure him”it’s very profound.”), when he chases her down to win her back, he tells her that he just wants to be with her her. “I want to talk about Aristotle’s Caves,” he promises. “Plato’s cave?” she asks, to have Zeke respond “He got caves, too?” For both men and women, it turns out love makes you a better, wiser person.

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA)

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) lambasted President Obama this week for creating a voter outreach group called “African-Americans for Obama,” calling the move “worse than sad.”

Gingrey’s comments came on the G. Gordon Liddy radio show Tuesday. The host attacked Obama’s campaign for creating the group, speculating that if presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney created a group called “White Folks for Romney,” “the country would go bananas!” Gingrey agreed, going on to accuse Obama of using “African-Americans for Obama” to “create divisiveness” and pit “one race against the other.” “It really is worse than sad,” Gingrey declared:

LIDDY: President Obama [made] a speech in which he forms an organization he calls “African Americans for Obama”. Can you imagine what the hue and cry would be if Mitt Romney got up and said, “I’m organizing white folks for Romney.” The country would go bananas!

GINGREY: Well they absolutely would. I would like to think in 2012, thinking back to 1965 and the Civil Rights Act and everything that has occurred to improve race relationships, that we would be over most of that racial divide. I guess you always have some prejudices that exist in the minds and hearts of certain individuals. To use it as a political tool to get out the base is sad. It really is worse than sad. President Obama is going to get 95% if not more of the African American vote and I can understand that. I think we all can understand that. To use that and to go out and try to create divisiveness or one race against the other, it’s not just that, it’s one gender against the other, male versus female. I’m sick of all that and I think the American people are too.

Gingrey didn’t have a problem in 2008 when John McCain announced his “Hispanics for McCain” leadership team. Nor did he say anything in 2004 when President Bush created “African-Americans for Bush.” Same in 2000 with “Arab Americans for Bush/Cheney,” “Women for Dole” in 1996; “Asian Americans for Bush/Quayle” in 1992; and “Hispanics for Bush” in 1988.

Indeed, only now that a black president would have the audacity to create an outreach group geared towards African-Americans does Gingrey take offense.

It seems like some of the other cast is shaping up nicely. Sensitive hardasses are Christopher Meloni’s wheelhouse, so he should be dandy as Leo Durocher, the manager who laid down a clear line in support of Robinson. T.R. Knight, who knows a thing or two himself about hostile workplaces and coworker solidarity, will play Ralph Branca, the first Dodger player who stood with Robinson in public. And Nicole Beharie, who was just smashing as Michael Fassbender’s coworker and potential girlfriend in Shame will play Rachel Isum, Robinson’s wife. I just am not that familiar with Chadwick Boseman, who is playing Robinson, and I do worry that the movie who will marginalize him in favor of exploring the reactions of white people to a key moment in Civil Rights history. But it is nice for a younger, less-famous black actor to get a shot at stardom through a big sports biopic.