I happened to be in New York at the apogee of Lin hysteria, and I stopped into a sports store near Times Square in hopes of scoring his jersey as a Valentine’s Day present for my husband. After swimming through a chaotic but amiable crowd, despite it being near midnight, I was dismayed to find only unwanted XXXXXXXL sizes. A clerk confirmed there were no more; in fact they’d just gotten their first shipment -- and it had been decimated by feral shoppers.

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Is he, for instance, refreshingly authentic or just downright offensive? Is he regular-guy fat or too obese to be president? Is he a rare moderate Republican who is at least willing to discuss legalizing gay marriage or is he a standard GOP bigot who is deftly maneuvering to prevent such legalization?

How you answer all of these questions is a matter of political identity -- your answers all but determine where you fall on the larger political map, and in the process, highlight your assumptions about a whole host of issues.

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"Key & Peele's" deep flaws have gone unnoticed by the majority of reviewers, and I suspect this is due to the attractiveness of the package: Comics Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele are black folk who, like most white critics, want to move past race. In our sincere but hasty desire to actualize this mythical post-racist world, Key and Peele are the jackpot. Two light-skinned black men, middle-class in mannerism, who, like our black president, have white mothers. (It's also been popular with viewers; the show was Comedy Central's most-watched premiere since 2009, and was just picked up for a second season.)

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And, of course, Asian-Americans are going wild.

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I shouldn't admit this, but I almost didn't review Murray's "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 to 2010." I told my editors it was just a mashup of his two most infamous books, "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve:" Welfare programs make poverty worse, not better, and social support can't help the poor and struggling rise up, anyway, because they're low-IQ losers. Only in this book, Murray confined his analysis to poor and struggling white people, to defuse charges of racism that greeted his two earlier bestsellers. I decided to write about the book anyway, but I thought it would be of little interest except to wonky people like me.

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Bullying, unfortunately, was a part of the warp and weave of my childhood. I grew up in northern Minnesota in the '70s, where my Asian family was the only color in a sea of Scandinavians. When I was in second grade, a crew-cutted boy shoved me against some metal monkey bars, cracking the back of my head open.

But the most difficult time came when I entered junior high. I was underweight, bookish, bespectacled. Gym class was a convergence of all my anxieties. The other girls were tall with pretty hair that feathered and training bras, while I had no breasts and not even an undershirt for camouflage underneath the one-piece uniforms that looked like a baby’s onesie.

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GOProud, the gay Republican group that was founded because the Log Cabin Republicans were considered too concerned about gay civil rights and not sufficiently focused on "fiscal issues," is not invited this year, because they are too "aggressive" about being gay, which made Jim DeMint uncomfortable.

CPAC also uninvited the John Birch Society, which had made a triumphant return to mainstream conservative acceptance in 2010, when they co-sponsored the conference.

But! While the Birchers and the open homosexualists are no longer welcome, there is still room for multiple outspoken white nationalists!

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I argued a few weeks ago that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum might be able to believe they're not singling out black people, or "blah" people, when they rail against food stamps and government "dependency" on the campaign trail. Yes, Republicans have long used not just dog whistles but foghorns to tell white working- and middle-class voters that welfare programs only support lazy, undeserving African-Americans. Ronald Reagan gave us those iconic Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" and "young bucks" using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks. Gingrich is certainly playing on that long history with his remarks. (It's funny how our first "food stamp president" also happens to be black.)

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Gingrich persists because it's a dependable applause line, and because his political fortunes keep rising. Compare that to September, when Mitt Romney attacked then-candidate Rick Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” Perry backtracked, insisting that he only wanted to bolster the program and ensure its solvency. But in his 2010 book “Fed Up,” Perry made his opposition to Social Security clear, calling it “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.” Scrapping entitlements is a core tenet of contemporary fiscal conservatism, but most of the time politicians only get away with attacking the most vulnerable ones: Medicaid, food stamps and welfare cash assistance, which are means-tested and thus associated with the black (read: undeserving) poor, although whites make up a far greater share of food stamp recipients. Government welfare programs with Teflon political defenses — Medicare and Social Security — are nearly universal entitlements and thus associated with “regular” (read: white) Americans.

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One camp cites Paul's hate-filled newsletters and his libertarian opposition to civil rights regulations as evidence that he aligns with racists. As the esteemed scholar Tim Wise puts it: This part of Paul's record proves that he represents "the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe ... the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man’s property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings."

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It reminds me very much of my eighth-grade teacher who so desperately hoped to be the mythic sage who made a difference, but failed to realize his well-meaning musings about why “black families can’t stay together these days” did little to raise our awareness of anything other than his own desire to seem good. And this is what "Parenthood" does in its broad-stroke coverage of everything that could happen in the life of a modern American family. Since we're all terrified of being different, there is some point in airing things we might still regard with shame: infidelity, moving back with your parents, not going to college, raising an autistic child, and, finally, interracial dating. As the end product of an interracial date, I find this last theme most interesting. On the show, it’s explored in two story lines.

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In the most misguided attempt at social understanding since Kirk Lazarus donned blackface, Beaver Ridge Elementary School decided earlier this term to shoehorn a little of the antebellum into its math worksheets. "Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?" asks one. Another posits, "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?" Let's see ... Divide by eight, multiply by seven … got it. The answer is, "Oh my God are you people crazy?"

In a surprise to exactly no one, save the school's faculty, parents were displeased to discover their children -- the majority of whom are minorities – were being grilled on the subjects of slave labor and ass whippings. Apparently at Beaver Ridge, there are four R's – reading, writing, arithmetic and racism. As one stunned father told local station WSB-TV, "It blew me away."

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The transcript:

GREGORY: First of all, you gave a speech in Georgia with language a lot of people think could be coded racially-tinged language, calling the president, the first black president, a food stamp president.

GINGRICH: Oh, come on, David.

GREGORY: What did you mean? What was the point?

REP. GINGRICH: That's, that's bizarre. That--this kind of automatic reference to racism, this is the president of the United States. The president of the United States has to be held accountable. Now, the idea that--and what I said is factually true. Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps. One out of every six Americans is on food stamps. And to hide behind the charge of racism? I have--I have never said anything about President Obama which is racist.

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Let me try to give Santorum the benefit of the doubt, for a minute. Even on Monday, I noted that his "black people" comment seemed like a strange non sequitur, because no one was talking about race. The former Pennsylvania senator was in the middle of a typical rant about welfare, specifically Medicare, when he made the remark. On the other hand, I watched and listened to the CBS News video repeatedly, and I had no doubt he said "black people."

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Here's Paul on C-SPAN in 1995, talking about his newsletters:

The fact is, Paul has lied like a very old-fashioned sort of politician about these newsletters, and he has been lying for years. He has gone through the motions of public regret about their contents, but has never acknowledged knowing who wrote the offensive material or even being aware that offensive material went out under his name. That's bullshit. Now he ducks questions on the subject entirely (and his supporters complain that it's "old news," because they have no serious defense of the comments or Paul's responsibility for them).

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Those were the results, mind you, at the height of the Jim Crow era, when discrimination and white-on-black racial violence were out in the open and, in many cases, celebrated. So it's no surprise that with that kind of overt bigotry now underground, white denialism of persistent institutional racism is alive and well, according to new national survey data analyzed by the Greenlining Institute.

As the watchdog group's report finds:

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I say that as someone who was present when the Occupy Wall Street began in New York on Sept. 17 and who has visited 15 occupation sites around the country. I was at Zuccotti Park almost every day for the first three weeks of the occupation and I saw it transition from a movement almost exclusively of white youth to a broad left movement to a multiracial movement and finally to something that represents the composition of this country more accurately than almost any other social phenomenon we can imagine.

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Our hypothetical casual observer might therefore also conclude that epic fantasy -- one of today's most popular genres -- would hold little interest for African-American readers and even less for African-American writers. But that observer would be dead wrong. One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy is N.K. Jemisin, whose debut novel, "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms," won the Locus Award for best first novel and nominations for seemingly every other speculative fiction prize under the sun. Another is David Anthony Durham, whose Acacia Trilogy has landed on countless best-of lists. Both authors recently published the concluding books in their trilogies.

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According to the AP, Perry said he doesn't support a campaign (mentioned by Joan Walsh earlier this week) by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to introduce specialty license plates featuring an unambiguously hateful symbol of white supremacy.

The Republican presidential hopeful was in Florida for a fundraiser and told Bay News 9’s “Political Connections” and the St. Petersburg Times that, “we don’t need to be opening old wounds.”

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