A majority of the voters of Fremont, Nebraska have approved a new law – sure to be challenged in court – that bans undocumented Latino immigrants from jobs and rental housing there. Proponents of the law said the city of 25,000, which, according to census figures, has a small Latino population, was being inundated with “illegal immigrants” who were driving up the crime rates ans draining funds for city services. Fremont city officials urged voters to defeat the proposal, saying such a measure would likely be found unconstitutional, even as the cost of defending it would seriously harm the city’s finances. But the majority of voters ignored them.

Dressing Up as the Klan

Catherine Ariemma, a history teacher at Lumpkin County [Georgia] High School, had a group of students don homemade Ku Klux Klan costumes to learn about the history of racism in the USA. She described the racial make-up of the class as having students of multiple races, but no blacks. Ariemma said the high schoolers, who made their robes out of sheets, were poking fun at the KKK in the assignment. She admitted that she made a mistake and is now on administrative leave.

In recent weeks, two stores in New Jersey have reported incidents of random teens using their public address systems to say “All black people leave the store.” A boy in southern New Jersey is reported to have done this before Christmas and again on March 14 at a Wal-Mart, and a girl in northern New Jersey did it on the weekend of April 10 in a Whole Foods. Both teens have been charged with bias intimidation and harassment. Is this a teen prank, or is it racist?

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.