The figures from the American Community Survey just in are more than crunched numbers. They suggest that this might be a good year for a certain term now familiar in American parlance to be, if not consigned to history, reassigned.

Namely, as of now, almost 1 in 10 black people are foreign-born. About 1 in 30 are from Africa. Which means that they are--you see where I’m going--African American in the true sense. Certainly a truer sense--true as in making sense--than Tracy Morgan, Donna Brazile, Jesse Jackson, or Mo’Nique.

Back in the day--1970, to be exact--there were only about 10,000 African-born people in the United States. I kind of remember that: By that time I, even living in a populous Northeastern city, had met a single African. And it was a novelty--the accent, the clothes, what we would today call the sheer “diversity” of the man.

Last year the number of Africans here topped a million, and we could use that as a numerically convenient time to let go of the conceit we have gotten used to over the past twenty years, that black people born here are ethnically hyphenated people of half “African” ancestry.

It just doesn’t go through. The black American does not look back on a childhood in the African “old country.” The black American speaks English natively, not Twi or Hausa (and in truth, it’s possible that not a single slave brought to the United States spoke Swahili). Barely a black American alive today knows anyone who ever even knew a slave born in Africa.

It’d be one thing if it were a hundred years ago and lots of black people still had parents who had been born into slavery and grandparents who actually “spoke African,” as it was sometimes put. But this is a very different time.

A possible objection, I imagine, is that native-born blacks are African in a “different” way than actual African immigrants--but this would be a feint rather than an argument: clearly, the proper formulation, if we are to put it on the table, is that native-born blacks are African to a much lesser extent than African immigrants. In truth, a black man from Jacksonville has more in common with a white one from Tucson than he does with a man three years out of Senegal.

And I would argue that native-born blacks are so vastly less “African” than actual Africans that calling ourselves “African American” is not only illogical but almost disrespectful to African immigrants. Here are people who were born in Africa, speak African languages, eat African food, dance in African ways, remember African stories, and will spiritually always be a part of Africa--and we stand up and insist that we, too, are “African” because Jesse Jackson said so?

After all, most of us don’t feel meaningfully “African” in the least. Sure, we’ve gotten used to saying “African American,” but it has become a kind of frozen expression, like, indeed ice cream (we don’t think about it being “cream of ice” when saying “eyescream”) or even knee-l (the word kneel has knee in it--did you ever think about it)?

Or maybe we feel a certain sense of pride from that “African” part--a sense that we are not degraded versions of shiny, happy white people but something else, entire, distinct, and unassailable. “AFRICAN.” And the term “African American” even has a nice weightiness and rhythm about it.

Well, it’s time to leave actual Africans to enjoy that.

For example, how “African” is, say, Oprah compared to a Caribbean American? We have heard much this week, for example, about the fundamentally African substrate of Haitian culture, and the truth and meaning in that is clear from even a superficial familiarity with that nation. Many of the slaves first brought to Haiti spoke a language of Togo and Benin called Fongbe, in which you put the articles after nouns: the table is wema o “table the.” In Haitian Creole, the words are from French but the syntax is a lot like Fongbe: the table is tab-la. Haitian Creole is one part French and one part African. For real. And it sounds like it.

In what was termed “Negro English” two Saturdays ago, the table comes out as – well, the table.

But still, why can’t we all be “African American” anyway? What has always worried me about it is an issue of pride. The notion that we do ourselves a favor by pretending that we are part “African” after four hundred years of cultural development right here in America implies that what we have done here isn’t inspiring enough. Among black Americans in 2010, true black pride does not call itself “African.”

I, for example, don’t know where my African ancestors came from, and quite honestly I’m not on my way to turning in a cheek swab to find out anytime soon. It was too long ago--if my genes trace back to, say, Ghana with a bit of Nigeria mixed in, it would have nothing to do with the first John Hamilton McWhorter, who was born a slave near Atlanta. I, for the record, am the fifth John Hamilton McWhorter, the tail end of a story that began in Atlanta, migrated to Philadelphia, and is now living on in New York. An American story.

My openly bisexual saxophone playing great-grandmother didn’t know from Benin. My great-aunt who was still running up the steps of the now-defunct North Philadelphia train station in her nineties did not speak Yoruba (and in fact spoke a solid, crisp “Negro dialect” I recall fondly). My grandfather didn’t set up his printing shop in Lagos. My parents made my life possible far, far from Angola. I am not “African American”--I am black American.

Yeah, black will have to do. We just saw how hopeless “Negro” would be, and “colored” is cute but could theoretically apply to anyone not Caucasian. Black was fine before, and it’s fine now. And let’s not even get into incidents where white people born and raised in Africa get into trouble for calling themselves African American when they move here--cases like an especially disturbing case from last summer (a white Mozambiquean was assaulted for calling himself African American).

“He’s supposed to just understand!” some think--but how well do any of us, white or black, understand the usage of African American under current circumstances? Is there, really, anything to be understood?

I suggest there is something that needs to be changed -- to avoid future cognitive dissonance (including lawsuits) as well as foster pride in our black American heritage right here.

I haven’t used “African American” in print since 2004 except in ironic quotes or to refer to the term itself. I urge other writers to consider joining me.

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To rake Harry Reid over the coals about his “no Negro dialect” comment will bring to mind the Biblical passage about trying to take a speck out of someone’s eye when you’ve got a log in your own. Pretty much all of America black and white feels exactly the way Harry Reid does about the way black people talk – and aren’t even worried about saying it out loud.

First of all, we need not pretend that by “Negro dialect” Reid meant the cartoon minstrel talk of Amos n Andy. After all, why would Reid, a rational human being under any analysis, be under the impression that any black person talks like Uncle Remus, much less be surprised that one of them does not? My guess is that he said “negro” in a passing attempt to name Black English in a detached, professional way, randomly choosing a slightly arcane and outdated term. Or, consider that Negro English was what scholars called “Ebonics” until the early seventies. Reid likely caught wind of that terminology -- he's been around a while, after all.

Second, yes there is a such thing as Black English. Sometimes one hears a claim that Black English is the same as white Southern English. We must always beware of stereotyping and be open to the counterintuitive, but here is an instance where we can trust our senses: there is a “black sound.” It’s not just youth slang: it’s sentence patterns – Why you ain’t call me? (not a white Southernism, notice) – and a “sound,” such that you’d know Morgan Freeman was black even if he were reading the phone book. The combination is what we all feel – with uncanny accuracy even without seeing faces, as linguists have found – as “sounding black.” Of course not all blacks speak Black English or have The Sound, and those that do (which is most) do to varying extents. But they do. That’s what Reid meant, we all know it, and it’s okay to know it.

Third: Reid’s comment suggests that he associates Black English with lack of polish and low intelligence, okay. But before we burn him in effigy for it or ask “What’s that all about?” as if we don’t know, let’s admit that most Americans feel like Reid does. He wasn’t being a benighted “racist” holdout; he was speaking as an ordinary American person. We have caught him in nothing we don’t most of us feel ourselves.

It’s a love/hate relationship we have with black speech. On the one hand we associate it with emotional honesty, vernacular warmth, and sex – Marvin Gaye would not have had a hit with “Why Don’t We Venture to Consummate Our Relationship?” or even “Let’s Have Sex” instead of “Let’s Get It On.” Yet it’s not a dialect – a sound – that we associate with explaining Greek verbs or cosines or engaging in complex reasoning. Black English sounds cool, and even hot, and maybe “sharp” – but note that sharp is what you call someone who you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be smart ... and who you don’t actually think is all that smart.

That’s a shame because Black English is as systematic as standard English, and what we hear as “mistakes” are just variations, not denigrations. Try telling a French person that double negatives are “illogical.” The “unconjugated” be in a sentence like Folks be tryin’ it out is used in a very particular way to indicate habits rather than current events, making explicit something that standard English leaves to context.

But in the real world, it’s very hard to hear it that way. You can get a sense of it with linguistic training or curling up with books like these by Stanford’s John Rickford and U. Mass Amherst’s Lisa Green, but otherwise, Black English will always sound to most people like mistakes, in all of its warmth. As we also feel about Southern “hick” grammar – race is not the only factor here. In both cases we spontaneously demote a dialect born in illiteracy. It’s a weird intersection: speech born in illiteracy is not “broken.” The most “primitive” society’s languages are the ones that are the most complicated; often the backwater dialects of a language are harder than the standard – out in the sticks in Bulgaria there are often three ways to say the instead of one.

That’s all very nice, but real life is that Harry Reid hears black speech as lowly. But – so do black people as often as not. In 1996 during the Oakland Ebonics controversy, black people were laughing as loud as anyone at the idea that “Ebonics” is “a language.” Or, over the transom recently I got a copy of a presentation that James Meredith, who was the first black person admitted to the University of Mississippi and caught hell for it physically and emotionally, nowadays gives to young black audiences. On the first page, Meredith spells it out:

BLACK ENGLISH LANGUAGE

PROPER ENGLISH LANGAGE

Which one do you use? Most people in this room use a lot of Black English and a little Proper English.

Anyone who wants to become an intellectual giant must learn and use a lot of Proper English and as little Black English as possible.

I am not going to argue with anyone about the matter. You can do what you want to do.

However, I will tell you that anyone who continues to use a lot of Black English will never become an intellectual giant.

So, Meredith would surely hear it as a plus that Obama has no trace of what a man of his years likely has been known to call, in all seriousness, Negro dialect.

Fourth: Reid’s feelings about Black English are likely couched in a thoroughly compassionate position. Here’s a guess, based on what I have heard countless people of all colors say:

“Black people use bad grammar so much because they were brought here as slaves and denied education. The bad grammar holds on today because too many blacks still have bad schooling, and they pass it down the generations. They would be best off if society allowed them the education and opportunities to get rid of their bad grammar. It’s not their fault.”

There are all kinds of things that are off here, if we are inclined to go pointy-headed. Humans can be bidialectal as easily as bilingual and can speak standard as well as Black English (which Obama does, and as Reid acknowledged); the dialect is now felt as a cultural hallmark within a richly ambivalent yet loving sense of its being "ungrammatical," albeit often unconsciously; and so on. But most of this is for seminars. Back to, as always, real life. I know so very many black people who would agree with the above hypothetical quotation from Reid -- many of them deeply dedicated in assorted ways to black uplift. Are they immoral? Do they hate their own people? No – upon which we can give Harry Reid a break.

Fifth: We have to really listen to what Reid said instead of getting carried away over the tangy, backwards flavor of the one word “Negro.” In mentioning that Obama doesn’t speak in “dialect,” Reid acknowledged something many blacks are hot and quick to point out, that not all black people use Black English. Okay, they don’t – and Reid knows. He didn’t seem surprised that Obama can not sound black when he talks – he was just pointing out that Obama is part of the subset of blacks who can. He knows there is such a subset. Lesson learned.

Indeed Reid implied that black dialect is less prestigious than standard, such that not speaking it made Obama more likely to become President. That is, he implied what we all think too: Black English is, to the typical American ear, warm, honest -- and mistaken. If that’s wrong, okay – but since when are most Americans, including black ones, at all shy about dissing Black English? And who among us -- including black people -- thinks someone with what I call a "black-cent" who occasionally popped up with double negatives and things like aks could be elected President, whether it's fair or not? Reid, again, deserves no censure for what he said unless we're ready to censure ourselves too.

Inevitably there will be reminiscences of Joe Biden’s comment about Obama being “articulate.” I’m less politic on that term as applied to black people who have no reason not to be articulate. A recent favorite: someone writing me a letter about one of my Teaching Company set of lectures on linguistics praised me for “enjoying yourself up there so confidently speaking standard English” – as if I have to take a deep breath and “wield” standard English and feel like I'm a pretty special fella for being able to, with my “native” ghetto inflections and expressions turning up in my speech when I’m tired.

But this isn’t the same thing. Reid implied that Black English is lesser than standard English and that it’s therefore good that Obama doesn’t use it in public. This is not about whether black people have to sweat to speak standard English; it’s about whether Black English is as good as standard English. Most of America black as well as white is at the exact same point in understanding vernacular speech and its proper evaluation as Reid is.

For which reason most of America should leave him alone about this and move on.

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So very “2004” by now – the days when the kickoff question for an interview on black issues was whether you agreed with the views of Bill Cosby. What was interesting was how many black people actually did – those who had a major problem with Cosby’s new tack were mainly a writerly contingent, itchy to see someone so prominent arguing against the tacit but potent assumption that there needs to be a second Civil Rights revolution.

This crowd have never had a satisfactory riposte to what’s on the paperback of Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s book Come On People: “When you have people tell you, ‘You can’t get up, you’re a victim,’ that’s when you know that it’s the devil you’re hearing, no one else.” Yet what with certain other race-related events having taken the stage since 2004, one would be pardoned for supposing that Cosby’s no-nonsense speeches were yesterday’s news and that now he’s just sitting at home. By no means – it turns out Cornel West isn’t the only black authority figure of a certain age making rap CDs.

It’s part of an ongoing effort Cosby has been making to reach out to the younger generation, through Facebook, Twittering, and so forth – but more interestingly, by trying to foster group discussions of the issues he started talking about in 2004 – centering around the tragic but unavoidable fact that a people can only fix themselves from within.

Cosby spares us his own delivery on the CD, State of Emergency, which would likely not strike modern hip hop fans as having the requisite “flow.” Instead, State of Emergency filters Cos’ ideas through “The Cosnarati,” a rapper crew who have fashioned the notions into rhymes and produced them with a fine sheen. No one would mistake the CD as a product of Timbaland or Kanye West, but there’s nothing hokey or fake about it.

Overall, it’s not what you might think. What makes Cosby’s challenging stance such potent stuff – and what riles that writerly crowd so – is that say what you want about him, you can’t tar him as “inauthentic” or “not really black.” No dissing him as having grown up (shudder) middle class, he has no white wife to call him out about, he has been on the classic Civil Rights side for decades, he’s not an academic and so can’t be classified as “too intellectual to understand real people,” no Hawaii, No Indonesia – he’s black America’s grandfather.

As such, the CD is as much about what ails black people as what to do about it. Get this note, even, about the cover art, which is said to symbolize:

the humiliation that innocent black men and/or people are subjected to when they walk into a store and are subsequently followed and watched. The creatures in the bush are fearful in the presence of the little boy who has an innocent curiosity – and is oblivious to their presence. The bush represents prejudice and incredulity stemming from persistent negative stereotypes of black people as anarchic and immoral.

And the songlist includes things like “Why?” questioning the injustice of things in a vein similar to Jadakiss’ rant of a similar cast some years back, “Runnin’” about how ghetto black men are too busy escaping to be able to sit still and tend to much of anything, and “Perfect World” about an America with bodegas full of fresh food, everyone dying a centenarian of old age rather than murder, empty hospitals and all movies getting good reviews (I’m not sure I get that last one, but still). Cosby gets it – his point is not that no one has anything to complain about.

His point is just that these things can’t be excuses. Too much “conscious rap,” as I have argued in many places, is “conscious” largely of what’s wrong, and contains a message, unstated but obvious, that listing and commenting on what’s wrong is, in itself, activism. The statement of the frustration is considered an action in itself, with further engagement beside the point (and not as thrilling). One of the saddest things I’ve ever read was the story this week in the Times about Native American young men unaware of a life path to take who are modelling themselves on inner city gang members, ending with one guy whose main ambition is to be a rapper and express his frustration – he hands the interviewer “Ever since birth, I been waitin’ for death...”.

But we will never hear from him again -- if only someone taught this kid to put his energy into something real. Which is not charismatic restatement of what makes things hard. “But it’s supposed to be a call to action,” fans object. Okay: when has that worked in the 30 years of rap’s history?

Cosby and the Cosnarati are looking for some real action. “Please listen to the words. We worked hard, very hard, to tell you about the State of the Emergency,” Cosby tells us in the liner notes. The idea is that groups will have LISTENing parties and then Discuss in a constructive fashion. So State of Emergency includes tracks like “Get On Your Job,” acknowledging the obstacles but speaking the ultimate wisdom. So, not “Get On Your Job” the way The Boondocks’ pitiless black-hating Uncle Ruckus character would say it, but one starting with where a guy might live. A sample, delivered rapid-style:

Lookin for a way out, doin’ it right,

Thinkin out loud what to do wit my life

Got to get a job that pays me well,

Got two kids, can’t seen to be fail

Lookin in the paper, fill out a app

Vacation and what after dat

All a boy do play video games

BET watch videos an’

Talk wit a girl, talk on the phone,

Go to da school, walk her home,

Dis is what dey talk about

The way back when, now walk it out

But he can’t pay for a pair of kicks

Known dis girl since she was six

Can’t get rich by chillin with chicks

Now you stressed, what feeling is dis

Girlfriend wanna go shop in the mall

You still in your Mom’s house watchin the walls

Ask for twenty bucks, ask for fifty,

How embarrassin, she’s laughin wit me.

...and in the wake of this, Get On Your Job. It’s not like you haven’t made some effort – but you have to try harder. You only go around once (plus the ladies will like you better).

The CD should be useful as a kind of pre-arranged venting, an immediate catharsis. The CD states the usual litany of ills – important, but in itself as meaningless as half a sentence – and then a discussion could be about that second half of the sentence: what now? It should also be a calling card for Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s book, which I wrote up not long ago here as one that more should be reading, where solutions are outlined more concretely than the rap format allows.

This is it, folks. It really is. As of that night two Novembers ago, the time when America made any pretense of being on the heels of some new Great Realization about what ails black people ended. No, I’m not being pessimistic, I’m being realistic: the history books will record Obama’s election as both the beginning of a new era and the end of an old one. Latinos have more premarital pregnancies and equally scary dropout rates. Tell the Native Americans in the article I mentioned that they don’t have it as bad as black kids in Chicago. People of all hues are losing their jobs and houses all over the country. Plenty people have A Dream today, and they all deserve equal attention.

Black people with A Dream need to get the Cosnarati’s CD (and the copy of Come On People that comes with it) and let a 72-year-old man and his crew point us to the future. Or – remind us that we are already in it.

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For all of the aching desire a certain crowd have had in 2009 to show that America post-Obama isn’t “post-racial” – and golly, I wonder if anybody really ever thought we were – the Tiger Woods business of late is a ringing indication that we’re well on our way to it.

To wit, what we have seen lately is a golfer who has turned out to be a philanderer. What we are not seeing is a Black Athlete who has turned out to be a philanderer. There isn’t anything meaningfully “black” about Woods’ “transgressions,” nor is there anything about what he has done that corresponds to any racial “narratives” that the usual dutiful suspects are typically trotted out to “remind” us of on a regular basis.

That is, Woods long ago declared himself to be “Cablinasian” to Oprah, and America has bought it. And it is of a piece with so much else: it’s the America whose youth have embraced hiphop as mainstream music. It’s the America who thrill to a 24 on television with not one but two black Presidents, and then elected a  real one. It’s the America who watched a thread on the hit sitcom The Office in which black Idris Elba manages the place for a while and is hit on by two of the cubicle-denizen women (including an extremely white one) and no one bats an eye – note that this would have been an eyebrow-raiser ten years ago and impossible five years before that. This is the America that sees Tiger Woods as just a person, evaluating him on – sorry – The Content of His Character.

Yes, Jena, Louisiana. Yes, people feeling that they will be more likely to get a job if they leave out the more identifiably “black” components of their names. Yes, whatever else.

But if we accept that change happens in steps – and I assume we all do – then an America in which a brown-skinned celebrity athlete is processed as just a person is big, big news. We have a Long Way To Go? When do we admit that we have at least passed the halfway point?

Tiger Woods, in designating himself truly a mutt rather than Black By Default, is ahead of the curve. There are those who think he was supposed to declare himself “black” because of how, say, police might see him. But to do that would be to deny that his Thai mother contributed half of his genes and raised him – raised him, unable, as someone not Black American, to do so as a Black Mother. So, Tiger was brave enough to – brace yourself, Soul Patrol – be what he is. Two things. Not just black – and not even mainly black.

Something we can all agree on – in fifty years a lot of people will see it as odd that in our times that was seen as news. We’re mixing, a lot. There are now increasing numbers of self-avowedly “biracial” people – the days I knew as a kid when the black-white “mixed” kid was faced with having to “admit” that she was “black” when she was about thirteen, crying at forums where such issues were discussed out of ambivalence over disowning her non-black parent, are past. Tiger isn’t, from what is evident publicly, especially deep – but he’s prescient. He is the future, just as FDR, hardly deep himself, gave us Social Security, the FDIC and so much more. Sometimes we need to hearken to people who are not given to thinking too very much.

It’s interesting watching how people stuck in the old, shall we say, narrative don’t quite know what to do with this. David Swerdlick at The Root makes the old assumption that in refusing to identify as black, Tiger must look down on blackness. “Tiger’s pre-post-racial vibe backfired because he apparently thought that it made him special. It turns out he’s just like everyone else.”

But wait – why the assumption that Tiger thought “Cablinasian” was “special”? More specifically, “specialer” than being black? Note the “apparently” – no one knows Tiger thought that. And it’s because it’s a chancy, not to mention abusive, assumption. Can’t it be that Tiger thinks he’s Cablinasian because, well, the woman who raised him is Thai? His mother? The woman who raised him, whose physical traits are evident in his face???

The idea that anyone who steps outside of identity as “black” must not like black people is, quite simply, a sign of the lingering stain of insecurity in the race. Think about it – a brown-skinned guy with a Thai mother says he can’t say he’s just black and he must not like black people? That’s extremely 1990. And thankfully, increasingly antique in 2009.

Time to trot out the Blacks in Wax. Here’s James Weldon Johnson, erstwhile NAACP head, on how to deal with bigotry – i.e. to translate into our modern terms, how the police feel about you:

I will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life. I will not let prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat. My inner life is mine, and I will defend and maintain its integrity against the forces of hell.

The elaborate language shows you that Johnson lived in times of open, virulent racism. And so – Tiger Woods today is supposed to identify as a brotha because, despite his Thai mother and Swedish wife and opulent modern American life, he might -- just possibly but not really -- get pulled over?

Are we to base a racial identity on negative impressions others have of us? Please. There is nothing meaningfully progressive in such a notion, unless by progress we mean eternally making white people uncomfortable. Feel “black” in 2009 as a response to how white people feel about you and you are giving in to a racism which, while ever present, is ever receding. You, with a black man in the White House, are letting racism win. Which is not strength – except in pungency of rhetoric, which is about .00001 percent of what makes a human life meaningful.

Then Jenee Desmond-Harris at The Root is taken by how she, taking in Tiger’s adventures of late, does not feel embarrassed that he is “one of us” making the race look bad – in a piece carrying an implication that this is somehow due to a flaw in Woods. The gist is something like “Okay, you said you’re Cablinasian, and I’m so appalled that I disown you and studiously pretend that you really aren’t ‘black’. So there, Tiger Woods.”

She doesn’t realize that this is the way she’s supposed to feel. He’s just a person. It’s what he said he is, it’s what he wants to be, and it’s what he is. And it’s what we used to say we wanted to be. Interesting – I can imagine a black stand-up routine where somebody said “These wives standing by their men admitting they fooled around – if Tiger’s wife was black you know she’d be all over his ass!!! (Ha ha ha ...).” Well, it seems hardly unlikely that Tiger’s skinny blond lady came after him with a golf club. Call it a “black” experience – or evidence that people are people and Tiger has been leading nothing but a human life. Isn’t that what we wanted?

Or – I’m trying to wrap my head around the sentiment here – is it that she is disgusted that Tiger doesn’t understand that white people are seeing him as a nigger? Yes, I am exploiting my own color here in writing that word – but I mean it and it’s necessary here. Is it that Tiger is too callow, with his Swedish hottie wife and such, to understand that white America sees him as a nigger?

According to this “narrative,” for example, the media are so interested in Tiger’s extramarital sex life because all of his mistresses have been white. Supposedly if he had been sleeping with black women America wouldn’t care – this is a major thread in the blogs, such as here. But is this true? Let’s say the photos of the Tiger bimbos were of shapely brown-skinned babes – can we really say that the tabloids would suddenly lose interest and go home? Wouldn’t this be even better news – i.e. “Looks like Tiger got tired of his skinny white trophy wife and needed some chocolate?” Think about it – “Looks like Cablinasian Tiger’s really black after all and he needed himself some flava?”

The real news here is that Tiger Woods, a brown-skinned man as “black” definitionally as our President, has been catting around with white women and America just receives it as a star athlete misbehaving. Oh, I know – surf around on the web and surely you’ll find some racist catcalls from lonely, anonymous individuals. “Out there” – the types who couldn’t keep a black President from the White House. But what is the national take on this?

He’s just some guy. He declared himself “Cablinasian” and married someone of the whitest possible extraction. They have kids, who are even less “black” than he is – expect the plangent autobiography from one of them in about 2025 about what it’s like to be the one-quarter-black progeny of a father who dissociated himself from cultural blackness back in the Gay Nineties, which will, by then, be pulled from the book-download sites about three months after posting due to lack of interest.

And here in the present, it turns out that “some guy” fools around, like countless people of his status. The women he did so with were white – and in contrast to the interracial facet that helped keep the O.J. business percolating not so long ago, nobody really cares. He’s just a person. Those who studiously disallow him that status -- rather than making peace with the obvious reality and moving on -- are contravening what the entire liberal tradition has been about in this nation. The pursuit of happiness is antithetical to hunkering behind the barricades of wary, defensive ethnic separatism when the times no longer require it. Pretending that they do denies what the Civil Rights heroes of yore devoted their lives to giving us all.

The Civil Rights revolution was about allowing people to not only become President, but to fuck up “post-racially.” Let’s – as progressives in the true sense – go with it.

It’s one of those hideous little episodes making minor headlines this week that will be forgotten by the media next week. 15-year-old Vada Vasquez of the Bronx is in a coma with a bullet in her brain, after being caught in the crossfire when a group of Bloods took aim at 19-year-old Tyrone Creighton (and succeeding; he’s in the hospital, too).

The Bloods went after Creighton at the behest of friends of a man in Rikers who suffered a beatdown by Creighton’s two brothers in Rikers with him. The shooter was allegedly little 16-year-old Carvett Gentles, “baby-faced” as the stories are terming him with the regularity of a Homeric epithet.

You never know which ones of your pieces are going to get around. Last week World Affairs published an essay I wrote exploring whether it would necessarily be such a horrible thing if only one language were spoken in the world.

I write that within a context: of the 6000 languages on earth, it is estimated that only about 600 will exist a hundred years from now. The big languages are edging the tiny ones, and even the medium-sized ones, out. In recent centuries, this has been first because of active extermination--Native Americans were often forbidden to speak their home languages in school--and later because of “globalization”: children raised in a city by migrant parents are unlikely to learn the language their parents spoke back in the village.

To strike a note I generally avoid, I am offended. And by a cartoon. Has anybody noticed what a patronizing mess Seth MacFarlane’s new The Cleveland Show is?

Cleveland is the pudgy, mild-mannered drawling pal of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, who now has, in the parlance of the grand old days of the seventies television spinoff, “his own show.” And indeed, the whole notion of the show is in quotation marks in a sense. The premise, for example, is willfully as hokey as those of the old-time spinoffs (“Mary’s friend Phyliss moves to San Francisco to live with her ex-husband’s parents ...”).

While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University.

Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time?

At a Christmas party in 2004, a cousin asked me "Do you like Medea?" For a minute I was a confused, since it didn’t seem to be the occasion for sharing our impressions of Greek mythology. But it turned out she was talking about Madea, the massive, loudmouthed, pistol-packing black grandmother who Tyler Perry performs as in drag in a series of "chitlin' circuit" touring shows.

Perry sells DVDs of the shows on line, and ten minutes after my cousin put one on I was hooked. I’m not alone. Madea was the biggest new phenom in black America until Obamamania. The new film I Can Do Bad All By Myself is the seventh in a series of films getting across the Tyler Perry message, most of them based on the plays, and making more money than anyone expected when plans for the first one, Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), were announced.

I used to try to read every book that came over the transom. That didn’t last long, but there are always those amidst the flow that grab my attention, and among them, a few that really stick with me. Lately I have been struck by three.

Marcus LiBrizzi exhumes the story of the tiny Atusville community on the outskirts of a small town in Maine (Lost Atusville: A Black Settlement from the American Revolution). Atusville was a black district – but not one of the grand old bustling commercial black meccas that thrived in most large American cities until the fifties like Chicago’s Bronzeville. It consisted of a few dozen people from a small collection of families, with a surprising number of interracial marriages that seem not to have attracted particular notice, from the community’s founding couple in the 1700s to the parents of the last resident, after whose death in 1965 the community ceased to exist.

With the Obama Administration letting Green Jobs czar Van Jones resign, questions as to whether these people have any spine are becoming sadly legitimate. What, precisely, would have been wrong with letting Glenn Beck and the others keep screaming their heads off about Jones’ purported radical intentions? Why not do a Glinda and dismiss this nonsense with a breezy “You have no power here”?

After all, we are faced here not with serious charges. There are no modern-day Whittaker Chambers in this crowd. The Republican smears against Obama of late are nonsense, pure and simple.

Last Sunday’s third episode of this season’s Mad Men was one of the best in the series on many levels, which was why for me, a frequent little problem with the show stood out more than ever. Namely, the show’s depiction of how people speak is less accurate than the loving exactitude with attire, cocktails, product labels, and the like.

The most glaring example in this episode was what seems to have gone down as a memorable line from Peggy Olson, erstwhile secretary who is slowly climbing the corporate ladder. “I’m in a good place right now,” she says, which is dramatically compelling – it makes Peggy seem “cool,” a proto-feminist on her way to our modern reality, in contrast to what a dowdy little twinkie she seemed to be when we first met her. But would that woman use that expression in 1963?