T A B L E__T A L K Is a house really a good investment? Discuss the true value of real estate in Table Talk's Business and Personal Finance area ___________________ Brush up on your personal finance at barnesandnoble.com ___________________   R E C E N T L Y E-commerce: Don't believe the hype By Heather Chaplin Online shopping leaves me frustrated, bored and feeling like a schmo (01/22/98) Help! I have portfolio deficit disorder! By Daren Fonda My life fell apart after I discovered I could my check my stock's earnings and losses online -- whenever I wanted (01/15/99) Consumer retorts By Heather Chaplin The motto of the consumer warrior must be: Never surrender, never apologize and never forget there is no rational justification for $28 bank charges (01/08/99) Money talks By Heather Chaplin If you want to know if a woman is wealthy, check her pores, not her pearls (12/18/98) God rest ye merry, shoppers By Fiona Morgan Author Bill McKibben preaches a "Hundred Dollar Holiday" (12/11/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Money feature archives		The Jordan Effect: What's race got to do with it? THE COLORBLIND WORLD DEPICTED BY MADISON AVENUE ISN'T OUR RACIAL REALITY YET -- BUT IT'S A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. BY LEON E. WYNTER | For African-Americans, "black" has always been an absolute adjective: Like "pregnant" or "dead," there's no such thing as a little bit. Expressions such as, "I ain't gotta do nothing but be black and die," phrases that begin, "As long as you black ..." confirm black folks' awareness that the racial attitudes behind the "one drop" rule laid down in the 19th century by the Supreme Court are as immutable and eternal as the biblical creation. Since the 17th century, it has seemed that white people must hold black people firmly at arm's length for the world to keep on turning. Then enter, as he was exiting two weeks ago, Michael Jordan's legacy to American culture: the "Jordan Effect." The expression was coined in Fortune magazine last summer, when it estimated the economic impact of the basketball star's persona(s) to be $10 billion over his 14-year career. In the recent gush of appreciation over his Airness, Jordan's race was conspicuously absent, except as a footnote to the "Jordan Effect." As the editor of one upcoming Jordan book said on National Public Radio, before Jordan, "There was a line between black athletes and entertainers and corporate America; Jordan has erased that line." Say what? Isn't that the same indelible "color line" that Justice Taney drew in Plessy vs. Ferguson? The line that was looped around so many black necks for even looking at a white woman in the Jim Crow South? The line that W.E.B. DuBois recognized and immortalized in the 1950s and Derrick Bell told us to embrace and get on with our lives in the '90s? I think you can knock black America over with a feather every time it hears that the color line has gone away because non-blacks don't see Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey as black. White people, who presumably think this colorblindness is a good thing, seem unaware that a great many black folks are unconvinced, if not insulted, by such white pronouncements, safely uttered from living rooms in their white neighborhoods. Indeed, the most striking feature of race relations as we enter our fifth century together is the widening schism between race as it is depicted in commercial popular culture and race in sociopolitical reality. When I, a 6-foot-7 black man with a slight resemblance to his Airness, enter the car of a commuter train to the suburbs on a Friday evening, I feel some momentary stares that seem to ask, "Hey, we're not on the subway anymore -- what's he doing here?" Yet most of the passengers will go home and spend the weekend immersed in commercial media that aggressively reflects the browning of America. They'll watch television dramas whose census of lead characters, according to a recent Screen Actors Guild report, is disproportionately black. Or they will soak up professional team sports whose rosters are overwhelmingly non-white. Or they will catch their favorite trash TV talk shows, featuring a multiracial mudfest where race recedes before more important issues like "just when did you stop sleeping with your sister?" In between watching black or Hispanic detectives track down the bad guys, the suburbanites will be motivated to excess consumption by a burgeoning cast of non-whites in commercials. In Madison Avenue's world, white people will cheerfully let a black man push them out of an airplane just to catch up with a diet cola. Besides names like Jordan, Bill Cosby, Shaquille O'Neal and Vanessa Williams, commercials are increasingly filled with non-white non-celebrities, whose presence as Everyman in general market commercials was rare to unheard of as recently as 1990. N E X T+P A G E | The rainbow world promised by advertising isn't here yet