The Wrong Kind of Color-Blindness in Hollywood

How “new” can an all-white Hollywood be? Controversy is swirling around the latest cover of Vanity Fair magazine, which features nine young Hollywood actresses and muses—all very young, very thin and exclusively white. There are no Asian, Black, Middle Eastern or Latina actresses featured in “A New Hollywood 2010.”

KFC: We Do Racism Right

Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), whose slogan, “We do chicken right,” was part of an ad campaign to appeal to African Americans, is under fire for an Australian ad, titled a “Cricket Survival Guide,” shows a white guy uncomfortable at being surrounded by dancing black West Indians at a cricket game. His solution for that “awkward” situation? To hold up a bucket of KFC to placate the “natives.”  Video included.

An Associated Press story reported that, “First lady Michelle Obama chose to wear a gleaming silver-sequined, flesh-colored gown Tuesday night to the first state dinner held by her husband’s administration.” Whose flesh color was the writer referring to—certainly not the First Lady’s or millions of others around the world.

Tensions are building around an image depicting President Barack Obama as the Joker from Batman, many times with the world “socialist” under his face. A banner with the image is displayed outside of a club in Richmond, Virginia, which led to a protest by the NAACP, which says that the image attacks not only the President, but all men and people of African descent. Others feel the image is a reflection of some people’s frustration with the administration’s policies.

“A Cohort of Kids…”

A poster to a community listserv in an upscale small-town suburb, population around 39,000—nearly 60 percent white and 32 percent black, with a sprinkling of Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern and other—wrote to say that the town’s high school, which sends some 92 percent of its graduates to college, “…is an urban school. We have a cohort of kids who don’t have consistent middle-class parenting, who come to school hungry, angry, and belong to a culture that abjures learning … deifies certain sports, criminality, and entertainment above all else. The size of this cohort varies from decade to decade but they suck up a lot of the educational oxygen…”

Is Black-on-White Teen Beating a Hate Crime?

Brian Milligan, Jr., a white teen in Buffalo, N.Y., was beaten by a group of 10 to 15 black male teens wielding a large chunk of concrete, allegedly for dating a black girl. Mulligan, who suffered a 3-inch gash to the back of his head and a broken jaw after being kicked repeatedly about the head and face, was hospitalized and now his jaw is wired shut. His father, Brian Milligan, Sr., and his girlfriend, believe this is a hate crime.

Microsoft has taken some heat for changing the head, but not the hands, of a black man to a white man in a workplace-type photo, which also featured a white woman and an Asian man, whose images, on the website of its Polish business unit. The photo shows a black man on its US website. Microsoft pulled the altered image, apologized, and said it would investigate to learn who had made the changes.

Inventor sues AOL & Google, alleging racism

John Ishmel Henry of Soso, Mississippi, who invented the vibrating toilet seat, filed a lawsuit in May claiming that “he was called and depicted as a n—-r on two of the Internet service provider search engines, AOL and Google.”

Costco, the mega-box store giant, reportedly pulled thousands of “Cuddle Me” toys—black baby dolls wearing a cap with “Lil’ Monkey” on the front, next to a stuffed monkey. The set also includes a half-peeled toy banana and baby bottle. According to news reports, some parents found the whole thing racist. The Costco website shows African American, Latino and white babies with a panda. The toy is made by Brass Key; a spokesperson for that company said the offensive meaning was not “within their realm of thinking.”

“We’re dumbing down the Naval Academy,” Bruce Fleming, an academy English professor, told the Washington Post in response to the recent swearing in of the U.S. Naval Academy’s most racially diverse class ever. From its most diverse applicant pool, the number of African-American students grew from 6 to 10 percent, and Latino students from 10 to 14 percent. Fleming also complained that “We’re dumbing down the officer corps.”