NEWSRACE IN THE MEDIA

More than a month has passed since Marilyn Davenport, an elected official with the Republican Party of Orange County, Calif., mass emailed a photo of President Obama and his parents as chimps with the caption: “Now you know why – no birth certificate.”

Despite repeated calls for her resignation from both the public and fellow Republicans, Davenport has not stepped down for sending the racist email. And because she’s an elected official, the O.C. Republican Party cannot force her to resign, although the group officially censured her for her behavior in early May.

Davenport needs to be held responsible for her actions. Change members have not only driven petitions asking that Davenport step down but also asked the O.C. Republican Party’s donors to withhold additional financial contributions to the group until Davenport leaves. In two weeks, nearly 450 people have signed the petition, making it crystal clear that the public wants Davenport to go.

Racist attacks against President Barack Obama are nothing new.

But when Marilyn Davenport recently emailed a photo of President Obama as a chimp to friends and colleagues, she sparked international outcry.

That’s because Davenport isn’t just anyone - she's an elected official. Her email shocked members of California’s Orange County Republican Party, where she serves on the central committee.

Take OC Republican Party chair Scott Baugh. He told the OC Weekly that he found Davenport’s email “despicable” and “dripping with racism.” The email depicted Obama’s head superimposed on a young chimp posing in a family portrait with two chimp parents. The caption reads: “Now you know why no birth certificate.”

Over the weekend we reported about Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's refusal to denounce a proposal to honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a co-founder of the Ku Klux Klan infamous for leading his rebels in a massacre of black Union soldiers, with an official Mississippi license plate.

After more than a week of side stepping the issue and telling the state NAACP and others that he would not denounce the notion of recognizing the racist confederate general, the governor, who has presidential aspirations, seems to have felt the political heat and yesterday stated for the first-time that he would veto any measure that seeks to honor General Forrest.

Yes!

We did it again, folks!

Indian consumers have long been inundated with ads that use prominent Bollywood actors to promote skin-lightening products. But the Indian edition of Elle Magazine, a 'classy' global publication which one would hope has higher standards, brought in the new year by further enforcing the racial color hierarchy with a white-washed Bollywood actress on the January 2011 cover.

Tens of thousands of Change.org members have told Elle publishers, art directors and editors exactly what we think about the whitening of former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and this weekend the 50,000th person joined the campaign!

Looks like California's celebration of Martin Luther King Day took a turn for the... Arizonian. This month students and faculties from two California campuses are fighting the demolition of their ethnic studies programs: Asian American Studies and Cal State Los Angeles and American Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Late last year Dean James Henderson at CSULA offered students and faculty a grim holiday gift – notification that he had decided to suspend Asian American Studies, indefinitely. To date, the only explanation Henderson has offered is lack of faculty, student, and community support – which he announced at a November 29 meeting to a roomful of concerned faculty, students, and community members. Since then, a grassroots movement in support of retaining the program has been swelling both on and off campus (check out Immigrant Rights blogger Gabriel Garcia's post on it).

CSULA is located in the San Gabriel Valley, which holds one of the largest Chinese populations in the country. Asian American Studies – which was just established in 2005 – failed in the Dean's eyes to meet enrollment numbers. However, the decision of a Dean to dismantle the program without prior discussion with students and faculty is a threat to more than just one department on one campus.

"Cutting AAAS is an attack on the university’s diversity and threatens the already tenuous support of the campus’ Chicano, Latin American, and Pan African Studies programs as well," explains a grassroots website launched in opposition to the suspension. In light of Arizona's recent ethnic studies ban, CSULA's decision is another threat toward the demolition of valuable ethnic studies programs throughout the country – and this isn't just a theory.

In the United States, mature discussions of race and racism are rare. Instead of openly engaging with the complex ways in which all of us experience race everyday, Americans tend to shy away, calling themselves “colorblind”.

A worrying example of this trend surfaced last week when Alabama-based NewSouth Books announced their release of a censored version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn that will replace the word “nigger” with “slave” and “injun” with “Indian”.

Tell NewSouth Books to stop whitewashing our nation’s past! Please sign the petition to keep the censored Huck Finn off the shelves!

Auburn University English professor Alan Gribben originally envisioned a censored Huck Finn after becoming uncomfortable uttering the words during public readings. Middle and high school teachers privately confessed that they shared his discomfort when teaching the book in their own classrooms, he claims.

Dr. Gribben says removing the offensive words will make the text more comfortable to teach and therefore more accessible to students.

The problem with this argument is the book then becomes an example of erasing another part of our country’s challenging racial past.

As a high school sophomore, I remember an African-American student refusing to read Huck Finn because of the use of the word “nigger” – a rare moment of protest that both confused and intrigued me. But instead of engaging the student’s concerns in a deeper discussion that could have comforted the student and helped the rest of us clarify our own racial understanding, the English teacher threatened her with disciplinary action and let the opportunity slip away.

It looks like Elle Magazine had quite the white Christmas.

Recently in the news for lightening the skin of Gabourey Sidibe on the September cover, the magazine has done it again, featuring prominent Bollywood actress and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan on the January 2011 cover looking far paler than she is in real life.

I had to do a double take when I first saw the cover page. Not only does Ms. Rai-Bachchan look far whiter than she is in real life, she also looks like a red-head. Aishwarya is reportedly in shock and plans to sue the magazine if the allegations are true.

There are those who would defend the magazine for using some kind of lighting or a Photoshop trick, or who think that this is no big deal and skin lightening is similar to tanning.

To put this into context: Indian consumers have long been inundated with ads that use prominent Bollywood actors to promote skin-lightening products. In a country that produces gorgeous women of color, it is sad that Ms. Rai-Bachchan, who is relatively light-skinned, is one of the very few with some cross-over international appeal. To see magazines like Elle further enforce the color hierarchy by making Aishwarya appear lighter-skinned is a slap in the face to thousands of young Indian women who aspire to be models and actors. It also plays into systemic racism when Indian women across the world pick up a copy of Elle Magazine and can barely recognize one of their own celebrities due to the fact that her skin tone was digitally lightened.

Driving along South Carolina's Interstate 26 at this time of year, one is introduced to a number of wondrous scenes: trees slightly tinged with orange; a vast blue sky; generous 70-something degree weather.  Oh yeah, and hate propaganda that could make a Chairman blush.

A billboard donning the words "Islam Rising" in bold red letters – with the tagline "Be Warned" – is a beacon for fearmongerers promoting a documentary of the same name produced by the ultra-conservative Christian Action Network for those who can only swallow information in two-word doses about the 'threats' of Islamic culture.

Well, here's another two-worder for you: That's racist.

The "Islam Rising" headline is accompanied by the angry eyes of someone who looks like a cross between Scorpion from Mortal Combat and the chain belonging to Plies the rapper. The caricature peering at you through a ski mask is, supposedly, an Islamic terrorist.  Silly racists forgot that everyone knows it doesn't snow in Muslim Town.

Making my first roadtrip through the State of Smiling Faces and Beautiful Places, my first reaction to it was of course to immediately u-turn and snap photos (my parents love when I post travel pix). My next was to 'tap the Googles' and see what outrage has erupted around it. But coverage of the display is overwhelmingly in support of the billboard and its message, with only a couple of local networks acknowledging that some people might possibly kinda sorta have a problem with it.

Discussions about race can be tricky, if not dangerous. Even the best intentioned folks can find themselves stumbling into the landmines of vocabulary. Once detonated, the person who triggered the explosion needs more than a “But, I’m not a racist” to put out the fire.

Racism is structural, so our words run the danger of reinforcing the structures that exist to disenfranchise groups of people. Some might try to surround a word with nuanced contexts, but racial epithets are fraught with historical meaning, and racist intention may not be necessary for a word to be racist.

Words carry weight, conveying our values and political inclinations, informing our audience where we stand on a given subject. Unfortunately, public debate in the US is often caught between the First Amendment and 'political correctness'.

There are those instances when a person clearly knows that a word is widely considered racist. Take the 'N-word', for instance. Although non-Blacks have argued that they can use the word because some Black people use it (see Dr. Laura), popular knowledge maintains that this is a racist term, and whether it’s permissible for Black people to use the word is for Black people to decide (see Rev. Irene Monroe’s take on the topic).

But there are many cases in which the line isn’t as clear. Readers may have noticed, for example, the current immigration debate jumping between using 'Illegal' and 'Undocumented' to refer to immigrants without legal resident status in the US. While some use the terms interchangeably, for progressive pro-immigrant advocates, they’re actually antonymous.

Whatever the election results, Fox News is gonna win big on Tuesday. And that's bad news for all of us, especially people of color.

ColorLines' Rinku Sen penned an article this week called "The Most Racist Campaign in Decades" highlighting racially inflammatory tactics promoted by Fox and used against Muslims, South Asians and immigrants this campaign season.

And whether it's launching the fever dream that Glenn Beck calls a television show the day after Obama was inaugurated, demonizing immigrants and people of color, or uncritically endorsing the Tea Party and its ultra right-wing candidates, Fox has proven it's a political force that can spread lies and half-truths with little accountability — and all to benefit Republicans and the country's richest citizens.

Often, this support for the right-wing extends beyond the newsroom. News Corporation, Fox's parent company, donated $1.25 million to the Republican Governors' Association this year. Glenn Beck recently said that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying organization that represents the interests of the richest Americans, is "our grandparents, our parents — they are us." That may not make much sense, but Beck's followers got the message. That day, they donated $300,000 to the country's richest Americans ... enough to crash the organization's computer server.

This bizarre event is only the latest story in Fox's sordid, and successful, recent history. Press watchdog Media Matters released a short history of the channel's race-baiting, lies and fundraising for Republican candidates and causes.