To a devout Catholic girl — I grew up reading the lives of the saints, wanting to be a nun or a missionary — the civil rights movement was the struggle of good and evil written quite literally in black and white, a story from the pages of my saints books come to life. Wanting so desperately to be good, choosing sides was easy. I was good; I was black Irish; I was not white, not really.

It would take me 30 years, two careers, motherhood and a broken heart to accept the obvious: I am white, sort of. (Though the new census, which allows people to mark more than one box, intrigues me, because it might make for a more complicated racial reckoning.) But I became white just in time to become a minority in California, so strangely, little has changed for me: I’m still watching a mulatto country trying to eradicate some racial boundaries and hierarchies while enforcing certain others. Even more confusing, today I find that the vocal racial purists are as likely to be black, Latino or Asian as white. Each group has at least one thing in common, though: Our rhetoric about race can’t even come close to capturing our mixed-up reality.

What’s most amazing is how much our black and white racial paradigm — victim vs. victimizer, the patron and the patronized — still prevails. And yet it’s an outdated script, reducing Asians, Latinos and the growing number of multiracial Americans either to bit players in our national drama or a vast army of victims (an identity most non-white Americans viscerally reject). But many of us cling to the paradigm, because we have no other way of envisioning racial relationships. I know that I myself clung way too long to a black-white, good-evil motif, obsessed with the possibility of racial retribution and redemption more than justice.

I was a type, a stereotype even, and a walking paradox: a civil rights do-gooder motivated by racial animus against my group — in short, a self-hating white person. Not all Caucasians in the struggle are the same, but over the years I ran across a lot of me. And the fact that mixed-up white folk are the most likely to get involved with civil rights work results in a deformed political culture, one in which there is little white participation in our national conversation about race beyond the right-wing scapegoating of a Pat Buchanan and the masochistic piety of guilty Mumia cultists on the left. Meanwhile, the coming white minority is getting little help in developing a language for its changing and legitimate concerns.

It took me a long time to come to terms with this, but after an adulthood spent believing I was part of the solution to racial strife, I finally came to admit I was part of the problem.

My views on race were an odd fusion of early childhood Catholicism and adolescent rebellion. I was a misfit in my extended family, whose working-class Irish racism clashed with my college-educated father’s tolerance. Plus, we all suffered from the Irish Catholic dysfunction Frank McCourt has made a clichi, but set on Long Island, not in Limerick: alcoholism, bad fortune and early death, borne with stoicism, denial, love badly expressed and more alcohol. I grew up and, especially after my mother died, exiled myself from my ignoble heritage, and all the loss.

But it wasn’t until my father died, too, about a dozen years ago, that I got the first useful clues about the source of my lifelong affinity with black people. Hideously depressed, I started doing consulting work on poverty and race issues, going to work for a black-led anti-poverty group in Oakland, Calif., and after feeling like an outsider at every job I had ever had, I finally felt at home.

Now the cause of my comfort seems obvious: Black people have a cosmology of suffering, a culture that makes sense of injustice and misfortune. White people in trouble are shit out of luck, stuck with a culture that acts like bad fortune is not just deserved, but contagious. Every black person knows in their soul that life is deeply unfair, while a remarkable number of white people skate through most of their lives unscathed, unmarked, unaware of the stacked hand they’ve been dealt. And I have always hated them.

I think hate may have had more to do with my racial views than love, but for a long time that didn’t matter: I thrived in my new world. I grew up there. After years working in white lefty organizations that only fed my ambivalence about success and achievement, I found myself surrounded by ambitious, accomplished peers, most of whom happened to be black. They liberated me to want more, do more, dress better and have more fun doing it. I was shielded from white girl guilt because it was all in the service of a higher goal: civil rights, social justice, uplift of the poor.

Emotionally, what I got from my new world bordered on the hackneyed: damaged white person finds solace and redemption through warmer, darker folk. But that’s not it, exactly. I got a lot of nuts and bolts survival skills: silence instead of talking all the time. Strategy. Looking behind the surface of things. Patience and perseverance. Perspective. The long view. It was my black friends, ironically, who focused me on how much my Irish family gave me, for instance, and jolted me out of my white self-pity and shame about what they didn’t.

It’s hard to believe now, but for a stretch of time — years even — I didn’t think about being white. Partly it’s that my friends were sane, kind people — a little nationalism here, some misguided Afrocentrism there — but mostly I was welcomed. Occasionally, though, I found myself thinking about my lone black friend in high school, who was one of the lone blacks in our town, period. He was always being told by jerky classmates not to be hurt by racist comments, because “you’re one of the good ones.” No one ever said that to me, but they didn’t have to — I knew I was one of the good ones, and only occasionally felt the outsider.

In fact, the worst culture clash was crossing back, whenever I had to see my extended family. It almost got ugly a few years ago, when I travelled for a meeting on urban poverty to a city where my once favorite cousin, formerly a hippie and artist, is now a cop. I never call him when I go there, but this one time I do, and we meet — where else? — in a bar; the first of many, with his cop partner and the partner’s girlfriend. Suddenly they start talking about “the niggers” and telling racist jokes, but my cousin stops them, gallantly, like he’d protect another girl cousin from locker room jokes. “You can’t talk like that in front of my cousin,” he starts, but he runs out of words at their look of shock. They’re mystified, waiting for an explanation. What could possibly be the reason they can’t talk that way in front of me?

He jokes: “She’s married to a black man!”

“That’s right,” I agree calmly.

But now my cousin panics; the joke has bombed. Nobody is laughing.

“No she’s not! She just doesn’t like jokes like that; she never has, even when she was a kid.”

The other cop shuts up, chivalrous if contemptuous, but the girlfriend finishes the joke, testing me. And I glare at her with deep disgust. I hate these people and then I hate myself for hating them. I’m a self-hating white person in an Irish bar. My cousin’s racist friends are paying for my drinks. I have more than a few.

Finally they leave and my cousin and I begin a kind of ritual lament: What happened to our family? Boy, did a lot of people die! Why did everybody drink so much? I tell him how I’ve always felt like an outcast, too smart, too awkward, with a righteous liberal father and a mother who died too young; not quite part of the family. He’s not entirely surprised; I think we’ve been over it before, drunk and maudlin in some other bar, but I can’t really remember. He says what I think he always says: You’re my cuz. (Like a lot of white cops he talks black, throwing around “cuz” and “bro”and “blood” not even ironically anymore.) I love you, he continues. I’d do anything for you.

What I want him to do is not be racist, and I drunkenly try to accomplish this. He tells me he didn’t start out racist; working on the street made him that way. I explain to him exactly the kind of work I do — the writing about welfare and poverty and urban education, the friends I have of every race — like I’m confessing to some double life. I say that if he lived in my world he’d see things differently: I have black friends — get this! — who are smarter than me. They have nicer homes. Their kids are better behaved than mine.

He says if I lived in his world I’d see things differently too. He sees black drug dealers, wife beaters, killers. Drunk and distraught, I finish with my trump: “My black friends are incredible people. They would do anything for me. And they have better families than we do!” He really can’t believe this; he has a hunch it could be true. At about 5 a.m. we stagger back to my hotel and I pass out.

He calls me the next morning, thoughtfully, to make sure I wake up in time for my meeting with my black friends to talk about racism and poverty. He tells me he loves me. But the next time I see him, a few months later, at a family reunion right after the O.J. Simpson acquittal, it’s clear something has changed between us. The acquittal has most of my family furious, with that white sense of vulnerability and grievance the O.J. verdict catalyzed nationally. Somebody notes darkly that white prosecutor Marcia Clark is dating black prosecutor Christopher Darden.

“You must love that,” my cousin sneers at me. And there it is: that old racial fear, that the civil rights movement was just a cover for black men to run off with white women, finally spoken aloud.

And he was right: By that time I was involved with a black man, somebody I’d met through my work. When I started in the field I was married, and I would chuckle when black female colleagues jokingly complained about the white women in our work who dated black. They weren’t talking about me. I had a husband, and he was white (Jewish, for the record, which my ex didn’t consider white, but my black friends mostly did).

But once I was divorced, as I got deeper into the work — meeting a lot of great young professionals, forming new organizations, traveling and socializing — it seems inevitable that I’d wind up with someone black. I didn’t mean to; we were colleagues, then casual friends and then suddenly it was more than that. He pursued me; at first, I resisted. I say that not out of pride but to explain why, after a few months, I was shocked when he confessed that our relationship could of course never go anywhere, because I was white. He wasn’t proposing ending it; just giving me a heads up that it could never be permanent, or even terribly public. Furious, I ended it, then took him back, and the drama went on for over a year.

Looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me — the rejection, that is, not the drama. It shook me out of my naive idolization of black people and my hopeless flight from myself. But it took me a year to accept it, because it was so far out of my experience: We, people like him and me, were about bringing down racial barriers, not enforcing them. I literally thought this was part of my work, creating the new post-race America. Sure, I knew about black men who didn’t date white women, but I didn’t think I knew anyone stupid enough to be a dating nationalist — let alone that I was sleeping with one.

Plus, there was an ease between us, a strange instant intimacy, that confirmed my intuition that this was meant to be. I’d briefly dated black men before, without having this feeling, so I was sure the connection had nothing to do with race. Now, I’m not so certain. I think for a while I felt hugely liberated, stepping out of the boundaries and conventions of my culture and my family, to be, simply, myself — what we all want in a love affair and so infrequently get.

And while I adored my father, I avoided men who reminded me in any way of his Irish Catholic passivity, his insistence on seeing only good in the world and his inability to fight back against what’s bad. What better way to avoid him than to date someone black? Of course, in the end, the black man I fell for, with his obeisance to the needs of his “community” and his endless dithering about our relationship, reminded me of nobody more than my father.

But during my year-long struggle to make the relationship work, I was weirdly, manically happy. I was on a mission. The personal most definitely had become political. I wasn’t just trying to win this man’s heart but save his soul. The 6-year-old Catholic girl within could not let him commit the mortal sin of racial prejudice. In our fights about our future, I found a new white sense of grievance, and felt liberated to call him on his reflexive, anti-white attitudes. One thing that had actually bugged me early and often in civil rights work was the tendency to lump together “people of color” as automatic heroes, and to leave whites out of coalitions around education and urban reform. I started objecting to it, first with him, then in larger groups.

And there were small victories along the way: He left my bed one April 4, the anniversary of King’s murder, to do a morning radio show on race relations. I listened in, still under the covers, as he issued a call to change. He included “people of color,” but then corrected himself and welcomed “progressive people of all colors” to join the struggle. I settled back into pillows that still smelled of him, feeling briefly vindicated.

It didn’t last. And my reaction when it ended for good still shames me. Amend the old saying to read: Hell hath no fury like a white woman scorned for her race. I felt like our break-up was a political issue, and I expected our friends to support me — even forcing some of them to choose between us. Most did, but what stings is the number of black friends who didn’t. At least a couple of supposed friends stopped speaking to me, angry that I’d turned out to be just another white woman chasing the black man, and with the nerve to be mad at him when it didn’t work. His social life continued unchanged, of course, while I was no longer invited to certain parties. I got a taste of the racism in the black community that says white folks are all right, but you wouldn’t want your brother to marry one.

And I was mad. Really, really, really mad. I latched on to my sense of grievance as a distraction from my broken heart. I had a political issue here. Finally I was a winner in that popular 1990s game (too bad Regis didn’t think to MC it): “Who Wants to be a Victim.”

Eventually I got over it. But when the storm passed, I was a new woman: I wasn’t a self-hating white person anymore.

This, of course, is the best thing I could do for black people, who naturally stumble under the burden whites like me place on them — to be both the victims we save, we white saviors, and the saints who redeem us, the suffering white sinners. This is not a healthy relationship.

But the experience made me realize just how big a problem it is that whites like me are the most likely to care about and work on race relations issues. Just as there are black people who fit themselves into white settings by assenting to the conventional group wisdom and avoiding confrontation, so there is a type of white person who works on racial issues, who bites her tongue when a line is crossed from truth to demagoguery, or from justice to retribution, for fear of reminding everyone that she is white. Angry, wounded, we are exiles, misfits in our own group, looking for a place to belong, and often we ourselves are more into retribution than justice, anyway.

After my wake-up call, finally resigned to being white, I started speaking out against the casual, mindless anti-white racism I had always ignored. We’re not talking Klan violence here. The vast majority of the people I worked with weren’t racist. But there was a fairly common, reflexive use of white as an epithet — white politician, white funder, white teacher — without modifier or qualifier. White had become shorthand for “arrogant, ignorant, out of touch.” I began to say a polite “Excuse me?” when I heard these casual slights, the way my black friends did at white insensitivity.

And I had a few arguments. I remember fighting to include the problems of white kids in a youth initiative that was designed to focus on Asians, Latinos and blacks — as though white youth are well-served by our bankrupt, sclerotic public bureaucracies and schools. I’ve defended Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown against charges that his crusade to clean up Oakland is racist: One thing working in Oakland taught me is that black political power doesn’t equal black advancement, and I no longer pay much attention to race when voting.

And I’m on the verge of becoming a crackpot when confronted with attempts to invoke a grand “people of color” coalition against whites. Early in my awakening I quarreled with an Asian-American colleague who formed a “people of color caucus” inside a do-gooder group that was white-led, but mainly comprising minorities. Why do that, I asked him — cautiously, nervously — why exclude white colleagues and allies, especially when they were the minority? Was there a program goal? He was silent for a moment, then angry. “We’ve been excluded for so long — they should know how it feels.”

Indeed. Revenge has come to seem like the motive behind a lot of civil rights policy. There’s always been a tinge of payback and retribution, for instance, in the way school integration, affirmative action and other civil rights measures were implemented — mostly at the expense of poor and working-class whites — and until recently I didn’t care. Probably, as a self-hating white person, I liked it. But with hindsight it’s easy to understand the racial unraveling of the last 20 years.

Affirmative action, to take one example, was always an imperfect way of distributing opportunity, but it made sense in a time of optimism and perceived abundance. In a time of scarcity and contraction, it became predictably divisive. Likewise, we moved to provide public education to all children — often forced by the courts to do so — without hugely expanding education spending, which sometimes meant taking from kids who had and giving to kids who didn’t. (There’s no room to discuss the idiocy of forced busing, except to say that just like forced anything, it only affected those without other options.) Now that the pie is expanding again, maybe the nation is ready for new remedies, but this time they should be far less about race and more about class and inclusion.

It must be said that my rehabilitation from white self-hatred probably started with the birth of my daughter, a blond Irish-Jewish tomboy who has always been drawn to black kids. Now, being a parent in an urban public school, I see how little public education is working for any ethnic group. In most classrooms, understaffed and oversized, conformity is valued over education, and kids who are different, whatever race, get the shaft. But our advocacy groups are divided into identity and interest subsets, which tend to fight among themselves, and thus the true shame of our cities — their unforgivably bad public schools — reach critical mass.

In the end, it’s my daughter who’s showed me the way out of our zero-sum racial blame game. In preschool, coming out of the December-January holiday season, she described her ethnicity in terms of celebrations: she was Hanukkah and Christmas, Kwanzaa and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. At about 6 she told me if she was part-Jewish, I was part-Jewish, since I was her mother. And instead of lecturing her that no one can be part Jewish (or breaking the bad news that because her mom isn’t Jewish, some Orthodox Jews will say she couldn’t be Jewish if she chose to be), I agreed with her. I’ve always felt part Jewish, what the hell; I’m part Jewish. Now we light the menorah at my house, too.

And recently I shared with her my father’s story about the black Irish. She broke into a big grin, part mischief, part wonder. “I’m black, too! I’m black! I can’t wait to tell Marquice!” She ran off to tell her half-black, half-Mexican friend. But her reaction made me think: When the census form comes to our house next month, what box — or boxes — will I check? I’ve got a subversive urge — part mischief, part wonder — to check white and “other.” If my tortured journey toward racial understanding has taught me anything, it’s that we all need to get out of our boxes.

Since the 1960s, data on race and ethnicity have been used extensively in civil rights monitoring and enforcement, covering areas such as employment, voting rights, housing and mortgage lending, health care services, and educational opportunities. In the 1970s, the federal government standardized racial and ethnic categories in order to streamline civil rights monitoring. Henceforth, Americans would have to identify themselves as American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, black or white. In the one adjoining category on ethnicity, they could also choose to select whether they were of Hispanic or non-Hispanic origin.

But the logic and strength of the mutually exclusive racial categories were not destined to survive long in a diversifying nation. In the early 1990s, these standard classifications came under fire from a growing number of Americans who believed that the bare-bones options on the census questionnaire did not reflect the new demographic reality wrought by two decades of high immigration and increasing intermarriage rates.

On the 1990 census, a mixed-race American was forced to either identify himself with one ancestry or put an X by the ignoble and anonymous “other” category. As a result, advocacy groups for racially mixed Americans called for a “multiracial” category on the 2000 census, an idea uniformly opposed by traditional civil rights organizations that feared the new classification would diminish their constituencies as well as complicate the task of monitoring discrimination.

Caught in a political tug-of-war, the Clinton administration stumbled on a compromise in the fall of 1997. The Office of Management and Budget, which incidentally was headed at the time by Franklin Raines, an African-American with a white wife and mixed children, directed that federal forms, including the 2000 census questionnaire, must now tell respondents to “select one or more” racial categories to identify themselves. By choosing multiple categories, respondents could indicate a multiracial identity.

At the time, few could have predicted that this small, politically expedient yet significant change in the questionnaire’s fine print would make much of a difference in this country’s stagnant racial dialogue. But on the eve of the 2000 census, demographers, statisticians, and bureaucrats around the country are still not sure how they will process and present the data that is due on the president’s desk by the end of the year.

While it is clear that the new multiple race option will give us a more accurate and complex view of America’s racial landscape, it is also certain to create a great deal of confusion — and perhaps conflict — for years to come. The NAACP as well as the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund are urging any of their constituents who may be part white to identify themselves as simply black or Asian on the census. Other civil rights organizations are already pressuring the government to “reassign” multiracial Americans back into the traditional racial categories, to resist dilution of any individual non-white racial group.

Although the census has never been able to formally count the multiracial, surveys and estimates do show that the number of racially mixed Americans has skyrocketed over the past quarter century. In 1970, there were an estimated 321,000 interracial unions in the United States. By 1990 that number had increased to 1.5 million. Surveys also indicate that the number of children in interracial families grew from less than one-half million in 1970 to roughly 2 million 20 years later. And these numbers don’t include intermarriages involving Latinos, because Hispanic is an ethnic and not a racial category.

If Hispanics are taken into account, an estimated 7 percent of contemporary Americans could be considered multiracial/multiethnic. And a recent analysis of birth records by the Public Policy Institute of California indicated that 15 percent of all births in the Golden State are multiracial or multiethnic.

In the nation’s most demographically diverse state, 53 percent of multiethnic births are to Latino/white couples. At 15 percent, Asian-white children are the second most common combination, followed by black-white (9 percent), Hispanic-black (7 percent), and Hispanic-Asian (6 percent) children.

While categories and classifications have evolved over time, the census has been collecting some sort of data on race and ethnicity ever since it was first undertaken in 1790. America’s ever-changing ethnic composition and shifting political moods long have been reflected in the very questions the census poses. In 1850, a growing national awareness of immigration led census takers to ask respondents’ place of birth as well as that of their parents.

Forty years later, a heightened interest in miscegenation spurred census officials to track the mixed ancestry of the people we today label as African-Americans. A person was considered black only if he had three-quarters or more black blood, mulatto if he was three-eighths to three-fifths black, and “quadroon” or “octaroon” if he claimed one-quarter or one-eighth African ancestry.

Over the decades, there have been many other changes in the terms we use to identify and classify ethnic groups. Asian Indians, for example, were counted as Hindus in censuses from 1920 to 1940, as white from 1950 to 1970, and as Asians or Pacific Islanders in 1980 and 1990.

But if the new census will more accurately reflect the nation’s reality, no one is clear on how to read the results. “It will be a statistical mess,” says Bill Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif. “What we do know is that it’s going to use up a lot of RAM.”

In this year’s census, the racial categories will remain essentially the same as in 1990, with a few exceptions. Black, white and American Indian or Alaskan Native and “other” will all remain unchanged. But the old category of “Asian or Pacific Islander” will be split into one classification for Asians and another for native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. Hispanic will continue to be a separate ethnic category.

Although there are only six major categories to select, it is the 63 possible combinations of them that could give statisticians headaches. And that’s not taking into account whether those possible combinations are Hispanic or non-Hispanic. That brings the number of potential racial/ethnic mixtures to a grand total of 126.

“I can’t see having to make 63 charts,” says Jeffrey Beckerman, the head of statistics for the Los Angeles City Planning Department. “But I suppose that somebody might.” Local officials throughout the country are still awaiting word on how the Census Bureau will release the final data. But as of early February census officials in Maryland still haven’t finalized their plans. “We’re still not sure how we’re going to show all the information,” says Arthur Cresce, a bureau demographer. “We’re still working through how to do it.”

“We’re going to have get over the idea that everything adds up to 100 percent,” says Linda Meggers, a demographer for the Georgia Legislature. Racial figures in the United States will soon resemble religious data in Japan, where 186 million people are counted as members of various sects when there are only 121 million souls in the country. In Japan, it is common for people to label themselves as adherents to more than one faith.

We do know that the bureau will release the data in a variety of formats. It will be obliged to present the entire range of combinations, but then there will also be the more abbreviated categories. The most common tables will probably be those showing the six major groupings plus one additional category in which all multiracial Americans are lumped together.

It may also choose to highlight the four major racial combinations, which in all likelihood will be white-black, white-American Indian, white-Asian, and black-American Indian. There will also probably be tables presenting “single-race” Americans alongside constituent combinations, i.e, a black alone category alongside a category for black combinations.

But despite the obvious complications in presenting the data, the real problems will come in the myriad ways people and public agencies will choose to use the numbers. And that’s where the fighting begins.

For instance, it is easy to imagine advocacy groups suing over the number of members of a particular racial group. For example, a pan-Asian organization may choose to combine “single-race” Asians with Asian combinations to create a super Asian category. It is conceivable that a competing activist group, say on behalf of mixed-race Asians, could argue to have the categories tallied differently.

In fact, civil rights groups are already pressuring the federal government to develop a method of “reassigning” multiracial Americans into the traditional racial categories in data that serves civil rights purposes.

The government has discussed various ways this could work, but the final plan of action is still unclear. One option is to automatically assign people who check white and another race to the nonwhite category. Another is to have people who are a mix of two non-white groups assigned to the smaller — and theoretically more vulnerable — category.

Much like their contrary stance in the debate over the self-standing multiracial category, this posturing puts traditional civil rights groups in the odd position of upholding the old, zero-sum racial scheme. Indeed, some black groups, such as the NAACP and the Black Leadership Forum, a national coalition of the leaders of major civil rights organizations, are encouraging people to check just one box this year. The nuances and complexities of the multiracial future may be too threatening to the stark civil-rights era perspective forged in the segregationist past.

“I’m sure everything will end up in court,” says Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University. “Whenever you have something where resources are involved, you can imagine people arguing about it.” Civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, fear that if enough African-Americans choose the multiracial over the single-racial option, they could weaken majority-minority voting districts set up in accord with the Voting Rights Act.

While recent lawsuits and legislation have reduced the role of race and ethnicity in public policy, there are still plenty of race-conscious statutes on the books. Federal policy under legislation like the VRA, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid to bilingual education is based on the percentage of a certain racial group in a given place. Also, lawyers in employment discrimination suits will sometimes try to prove that a firm is biased by comparing the number of blacks in particular jobs with the percentage in the local population. Any such lawsuits could be affected if a large number of African-Americans identify themselves as multiracial.

The counting of multiracial Americans could also affect the data many counties use to monitor the racial makeup of jury pools, as well as complicate the tallying of hate-crime statistics.

Curiously, it’s the keepers of health and vital statistics in states like California who may have the hardest time adapting to our increasingly multiracial reality. “I’ve applied to get a bunch more staff [to process the data],” says Jane McKendry, who heads the Center for Health Statistics for the California Department of Health Service. “But I don’t know if I’ll get them.”

She admits that the department still does not know how it will classify data on mixed-race people. For instance, they have not decided what to do with an infant mortality case involving a self-described “white-black” woman — whether it should be added to white or black infant mortality rates. “Race means a lot of things in health,” says McKendry. Black infant mortality is twice as high as white in many cities, for a complicated tangle of medical, economic, cultural and perhaps biological reasons, and race-targeted strategies have brought down the mortality rate in black sections of Oakland, Calif., Baltimore and Savannah, Ga. Such strategies could be harder to pursue without an accurate count of the black population.

McKendry fears that data on multiracial Americans could get lost in a useless “mishmash” category, and that it will be hard to draw comparisons between pre- and post-2000 data. But she also speculates whether all this confusion could one day cause health professionals to wash their hands of race and concentrate solely on access to care for all Americans — which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

But, truth be told, most demographers do not expect many Americans to avail themselves of the new multiple race option, at least not this first year. In 1998, the Census Bureau ran a dress rehearsal in three sites around the country and the overwhelming majority of respondents ticked off one of the standard categories. In Columbia, S.C., only .08 percent of respondents selected more than one racial category. In Menominee County, Wis., only 1.2 percent of respondents did. But in Sacramento, Calif., 5.4 percent of respondents selected more than one race on the questionnaire.

The dress rehearsal indicates that intermarriage is a largely regional phenomenon. “There are going to be a lot of empty [bubbles] in North Dakota,” says Frey, whose research has shown that the much ballyhooed ethnic diversification of America will mostly occur in the 10 states — California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii — that have become gateways to contemporary immigration.

The confusion about the census seems fitting, because it matches our racial reality much more than four neat little categories. It will also provide a welcome opportunity to reconsider the way we look at race in America. For starters, the multiple-race option undermines the logic of the so-called one-drop rule, the notion that any person with any amount of African-ancestry must be considered black.

While no one is naive enough to think that official recognition of multiracialism means that Americans will suddenly stop seeing race as a question of either/or, this still amounts to a significant first step. For instance, although the vast majority of African-Americans share some white ancestry, it is doubtful that many black Americans will label themselves as multiracial on the 2000 census. But if race is a social construct — as social scientists love to remind us — then it can also be deconstructed. The loosening of strict, mutually exclusive categories begins to allow for a more fluid conception of race.

After the 2000 census, the danger will be the tendency to “reassign” multiracial Americans to the old categories, or create new racial labels to “make sense” of our diversity. The more Americans identify themselves as multiracial, the less the strict categories of race will make sense in the end. But that won’t keep people from trying to parse America up into four or five familiar pieces.

In 1998, for instance, the number of applicants to the University of California who flat-out declined to state their racial/ethnic backgrounds jumped a phenomenal 190 percent in one year. But university admissions officers dug into the students’ SAT records to try to deduce their ethnic backgrounds without their consent.

Over the next few years and perhaps decades, there will be a heightened battle between the old and new ways of seeing race. A victory for multiracialism may not portend a new era in which all Americans are joined in a raucous chorus of “We are the World,” but it would free us to concentrate on what is rapidly becoming this nation’s primary demographic divide: class.

“The government really shapes whole issues of identity,” says Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters. “Over time, people will begin to answer [the race question] in more complex ways.” Before the changes in this year’s census, the federal government had essentially refused to properly acknowledge mixed-race Americans, the living and breathing solutions to racial tensions. The establishment of the multiple-race option was a clear recognition of a significant demographic trend.

Does all this mean that America is beginning to shed the remnants of a segregated and sordid racial past? Not necessarily. But at least now we can begin to visualize the melting pot we Americans have claimed to desire for so long.

One of the perennials that always shows up on history-of-TV compilations is the clip from a 1968 musical special in which Petula Clark lightly rested her hand on Harry Belafonte’s arm as they sang a duet. That brief touch freaked out Chrysler so badly that it threatened to pull its sponsorship. The clip is always offered in a self-congratulatory “look how far we’ve come” spirit.

But the secret imperative behind most of Hollywood’s black and white star pairings remains: Look but don’t touch. We’ve all been trained by years of moviegoing to know that at some point in thrillers or romantic comedies — after the growing rapport, the looks that linger just a second longer than necessary — the male and female leads will get together. Except, that is, when the leading couple is interracial. You can wait until the last credit has rolled in “The Pelican Brief” or “Men in Black” or “Murder at 1600,” all movies in which there’s a definite chemistry between the black and white leads, and the only physical contact you’ll see is — perhaps — an affectionate but decidedly nonsexual embrace.

There are no complex sociological reasons for the taboo still attached to interracial romance in movies. It’s racism, pure and simple. Perhaps these attitudes are sometimes connected to an executive’s fear that audiences will be turned off by the sight of black and white together, but a decision that bows to racism must bear the mark of racism itself.

The difference today is that black actors and audiences may be just as turned off by miscegenation as white ones. We have come from ridiculing Chrysler’s horror over a white woman briefly touching a black man to seeing nothing wrong with “ER” star LaSalle’s implicit claim that his character’s affair with a white woman was an insult to black women. LaSalle, whose character had had unsuccessful relationships with black women in the past, “requested” that the show’s writers end the affair because “it sends a message I’m not comfortable with,” a message that this relationship could be a happy one. Presumably, LaSalle wouldn’t have had any troubles if his character’s relationship with Kingston’s had been rocky. In other words, it would have been acceptable if it had been depicted as being as doomed as bigots — the kind who deny being bigots, the “I’m just thinking of the children” variety — have always said interracial relationships must be.

When it comes to movies, the two films that best highlight the differences between the two eras are Stanley Kramer’s 1967 “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and Spike Lee’s 1991 “Jungle Fever.” Both terrible movies by terrible filmmakers willing to subordinate everything to their “message,” the films are nonetheless fairly accurate barometers of each era’s acceptable liberal sympathies. In Kramer’s film, the good, affluent parents played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy have to confront their own prejudices when their daughter turns up married to Sidney Poitier. In Lee’s film, Wesley Snipes is a married black architect who has an affair with his white assistant, played by Annabella Sciorra.

Lee pays lip service to the way each character is rejected by family and friends as a result of the affair, but he can’t hide his disgust with the relationship. (Sciorra has spoken in interviews of how she had to fight to give her character dimension.) The first time Snipes and Sciorra have sex is after hours at their office, on top of a drafting table. It’s a device that first popped up in ’80s movies like “Fatal Attraction”: When the filmmakers want to show disapproval of extramarital sex, they shoot it so that it looks physically uncomfortable. (Think of Michael Douglas screwing Glenn Close while she’s perched on the kitchen sink.) Lee’s message is a blatant version of the thought that hovers in Hepburn’s and Tracy’s minds in the Kramer film: “Wouldn’t you be happier with your own kind?”

We’ve reached a point where segregation has become an acceptable liberal position. (It isn’t conservative critics who praise Spike Lee movies.) But separatism is not the same thing as either self-determination or racial pride. I’d argue that pride finds its strongest expression in the midst of difference.

Not that every movie has to be scrupulously integrated. It would be great to see more movies with all-black casts, and the crossover success of the romantic comedy “The Best Man” last year or “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” in 1998 means we may get them. There’s a thrill in seeing black actors starring in the classic Hollywood genres blacks have traditionally been excluded from (and a thrill in seeing just how viable those forms can still be). The hugely entertaining “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” is, except for its welcome sexual forthrightness, like those dishy women’s pictures of the ’40s, full of gossip and luxe surroundings. But it’s a drag to see one character’s white husband used as an example of her snobbishness. “The Hurricane” has no qualms about exaggerating the role of three white Canadians in freeing Rubin Carter from prison, but it doesn’t even mention that in real life Carter had an affair with and eventually married one of them.

Presumably it’s OK to show Washington going to bed with a white woman (Milla Jovovich) in Lee’s “He Got Game” because her character is a whore. (That’s how all the white women, and many of the black women, are portrayed in this viciously misogynist film.) But even that was apparently enough, as was reported when the film was released, to cause some black female viewers to claim that Washington had betrayed them. (There were no objections to Washington’s bedding down with an Indian actress, Sarita Choudhury, for some truly sexy love scenes in Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala.”)

The only criterion that should be applied to movie pairings is: Do they work? Actors and directors are hamstrung if their exploration of human relationships is made to pass some test of sociological acceptability. Real-life relationships rarely conform to such standards; sexual attraction is chaos. Why should it seem otherwise in the movies?

Of course we should be able to see comedies and love stories and thrillers with two black stars. It’s insulting (to both races) to assume that a movie with black actors will be successful only if there’s also a white person in it. But whatever the justification, there are no good reasons to prevent moviemakers from pairing, say, Angela Bassett and Daniel Day-Lewis, Vanessa L. Williams and George Clooney, Snipes and Julia Roberts, Taye Diggs and Chloe Sevigny, Courtney B. Vance (one of the most underused good actors around) and Sigourney Weaver. Think of where racial separatism has gotten us in our movie past. There are no musicals that paired Lena Horne and Gene Kelly, no comedies in which Belafonte might have dallied with Marilyn Monroe, nothing to suggest what two fastidious actors like the young Poitier and the young Jane Fonda might have brought out in each other.

Black male stars have had an easier time of it, but — with the exception of Washington — mostly in action movie roles or playing sidekick roles. That’s not to slight the pleasure I’ve had watching Snipes or Ving Rhames in movies like “Blade” or “Mission: Impossible,” but I’d love to see them do other things. I can’t be the only moviegoer who loved the teddy-bear slyness Rhames brought to his role in “Out of Sight” and envisioned what he might do in comedy. Perhaps the best male performance of last year was Charles S. Dutton in “Cookie’s Fortune,” and yet he didn’t register in any of the year-end awards. Often, the pleasure of watching black actors is tinged with the realization that it may be a long time before you see that actor in another role as good.

Black and white pairings don’t seem to be a big deal in foreign movies, as David Thewlis and Thandie Newton showed in Bernardo Bertolucci’s great “Besieged,” one of the most potent recent movie love stories, and one of the most potent recent movies, period. Likewise with Beatrice Dalle and Alex Descas in “I Can’t Sleep,” directed by Claire Denis, whose films have frequently dealt with interracial issues. Perhaps those aren’t good examples because the issues of interracial love are part of those films’ subtext. The same tends to be true of American movies that feature interracial couples. The most intelligent were both made by Carl Franklin — “One False Move” and “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the latter featuring Washington’s best performance.

The fact that a taboo still exists has led some directors to act as provocateurs. At the beginning of “Freeway,” a deliciously twisted B-thriller that constantly challenges the assumptions we make based on appearance, Reese Witherspoon shares a big, wet, lazily hungry kiss with her black boyfriend (Bokeem Woodbine), and as director Matthew Bright focuses on the young lovers, you can feel his glee at potentially making some people uncomfortable. And there’s overt provocation in Mike Figgis’ presentation of a white Eve dallying with a black Adam in “The Loss of Sexual Innocence.” (That provocation temporarily scuttled the movie at one point, when a white South African producer pulled out.)

In an industry in which black-white love is still taboo, we need that sort of effrontery. But even more subversive may be the times when love between blacks and whites is treated as no big deal. Race isn’t an issue in Figgis’ adultery drama “One Night Stand,” in which Snipes has an affair with Nastassja Kinski. Several pictures that were geared more toward the mainstream also take a nonchalant attitude toward race: William H. Macy has a black wife in last year’s “Mystery Men,” and in “Jurassic Park: The Lost World” Jeff Goldblum (whose character is divorced) has a black daughter (the talented young actress Vanessa Lee Chester).

There’s a sort of ball’s-in-your-court challenge to the refusal of these movies to treat black-white love as anything out of the ordinary. And inevitably the people who return the serve only prove the point. After “The Lost World” came out, I guested on a radio talk show where the conservative host (also a movie critic) kept harping on the movie as a typical example of Hollywood liberalism. Most people, he insisted, would find it strange that there is no explanation of how a white man has a black daughter (the usual methods, I wanted to say). This man’s condescending certainty that the great unwashed would certainly find the idea of black-white marriage strange beyond belief wasn’t the only thing he had wrong. A typical piece of Hollywood liberalism would feel obliged to address Goldblum’s marriage and the reasons (presumably racial) that it broke up. Steven Spielberg’s treatment of it as just the way life is (marriages break up sometimes) is much more sophisticated.

Perhaps no movie has done more to erase the taboo simply by ignoring it than “The Bodyguard.” This big, kitschy 1992 star fantasy plays as if someone had gotten the idea of combining Barbra Streisand’s remake of “A Star Is Born” with a Steve McQueen movie. (Kevin Costner even adopts McQueen’s haircut.) But it’s the most glamorous, and therefore the most unapologetic, depiction of interracial romance in the movies. For all the reasons that drive apart Whitney Houston’s diva and Costner’s hunky human shield, race isn’t one of them. It’s never even mentioned. They part for the most melodramatic of movie reasons — he can’t protect her if he’s distracted by falling in love with her.

“The Bodyguard” is a bad good time, but it’s also startling because it places black-white love within the context of the movie traditions that have excluded it. The message is that movie glamour transcends all other concerns, that race should be no obstacle to pleasure. I’ve heard all sorts of objections raised to the movie, from the ludicrous suggestion that a white man having sex with a black woman recalls master-slave relations (forget that Houston is the aggressor here as well as the one in the position of power) to the outright racist suggestion that Houston is so successful she’s an honorary white person. (Success nullifies your race?) But the fact is that movies with big stars tend to be very conservative. Yet Costner, then at the peak of his popularity, and Houston, making her movie debut, risked alienating some of their fans. And the movie was a huge hit.

Since movie executives listen to three things in determining what movies get made — money, money and money — the success of “The Bodyguard” should have told them that black and white pairings are no impediment at the box office. If they thought they could make money by showing Noam Chomsky reading Hegel for three hours, they would. That makes the cowardice that has characterized other recent movies all the more frustrating.

Reportedly, a love scene between Snipes and Diane Lane (a well-matched pairing of instinctive, quick-witted actors) was filmed and then cut from “Murder at 1600.” The plot device that keeps wiping out Linda Fiorentino’s memory in “Men in Black” also conveniently keeps the playful flirtation between her and Will Smith from ever reaching fruition. In “The Pelican Brief,” Roberts and Washington are thrown together in a danger-fraught fight against an evil conspiracy (a great movie excuse for sex if ever there was one). But when they wind up in a secluded cabin in the middle of the night, you get the sinking feeling that what’s coming next is a vigorous game of Scrabble. (The only movie in which the failure of the black and white stars to clinch doesn’t seem like a copout is Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” where the movie’s melancholy comes from the fact that Pam Grier and Robert Forster can’t make their attraction to each other work.)

No other interracial pairing remains as taboo as black-white. The wife Snipes cheats on in “One Night Stand” is an Asian woman (Ming-Na Wen), and in “Rising Sun” he carries on a charming flirtation with Tia Carrere, who plays the daughter of a Japanese woman and a black American. (The flirtation remains unconsummated because she is otherwise involved.) And white-Asian pairings have been a longtime movie favorite for stories of lovers with the odds stacked against them, like Lauren Holly and Jason Scott Lee in the Bruce Lee bio “Dragon” or, currently, Ethan Hawke and Youki Kudoh in “Snow Falling on Cedars.” (Considering how Asians were portrayed in American movies during World War II, that has to be counted as some kind of progress.)

Strangely, this separatism seems to me to run against the grain of nearly every other branch of pop culture. Hip-hop and the new-style R&B of artists like D’Angelo and Macy Gray now dominate American pop music. I’d venture that as many white reading groups as black ones choose books by Terry McMillan or Walter Mosley or even a tougher read like Toni Morrison. And despite the divisions that keep black sitcoms like “Moesha” hits among black viewers and virtually unknown among white ones, despite NBC’s recent admission that it doesn’t feature many black faces, black actors are a strong presence on TV.

Forget the black actors who are regular cast members of hit shows. A few months back on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Giles greeted (and immediately went to bed with) a black girlfriend who came to visit. A recent New York Times piece on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” noted that the practice of showing the contestant’s partner in the audience hasn’t shied away from either interracial couples or gay ones. A couple of weeks ago in an offhand moment on “The Practice,” Michael Badalucco’s character admitted that growing up watching “Mannix” he had a crush on Mannix’s secretary, Peggy. He didn’t mention that she was played by a black actress (Gail Fisher), nor did he need to. You’re attracted to whom you’re attracted to.

I’m not so naive as to suggest that the popularity of black singers or writers or actors signals the end of racism. The great big-band leader Artie Shaw told a terrible story about touring the Deep South in the ’30s with Billie Holiday as the band’s featured singer. At one gig, after her scheduled number, the audience went wild, not wanting to let Holiday get away. One guy down front yelled, “Have the nigger wench sing another one!” and simply didn’t understand it when Holiday talked back to him.

But the no-longer-token presence of blacks in mainstream pop culture has to count for some progress, though it hasn’t yet quelled movie squeamishness at showing black and white people falling in love or into bed. That reluctance refuses to recognize a basic reality of a world where the sight of black and white couples is more prevalent than ever. And it’s also blind to the fact that most of us go to the movies for pleasure and don’t much care where it comes from. When the pleasure principle is shortchanged, either by not giving good actors the roles they deserve or by keeping apart the ones whose star power draws them together, it doesn’t matter how good our seats are. We’ve all been relegated to the balcony.

But truisms have a tendency to fray around the edges, and the closer I got to the campaign the more tattered this one began to appear. On the brighter side, there were people, myself included, who wanted to see San Francisco elect the first gay mayor of a major American city. And conversely there were those who didn’t think San Francisco should fire its first black mayor.

But in performing a variety of tasks for the Ammiano campaign — registering voters, staffing tables, walking precincts, getting out the vote — I came into direct contact with a broad cross-section of San Francisco residents, and the fact is that a number of voters on both sides chose their candidates Tuesday for the wrong reasons.

“You know what this election’s about, don’t you?” spat a grizzled Hells Angels type whom I was registering to vote in the Mission District, a bastion of Ammiano support. “It’s about Willie Brown giving jobs to the goddamn blacks driving the Muni buses.”

Of course, that’s not at all what the election was about, at least according to an elderly, heterosexual white gentleman who approached me as I was electioneering in the Castro the following night. According to him, the election was about making sure Willie Brown didn’t take away firearms from law-abiding white families, leaving the blacks with all the guns.

Ammiano was not the only candidate benefiting from a little voter bigotry. A gregarious but somewhat belligerent black man I tried to register shouted that I must be crazy if I thought he would ever support a homosexual for public office. I tried to turn the discussion to housing and public transportation; ultimately we agreed to disagree.

OK, so I talked to a handful of crackpots and creeps. But some of the less savory criticisms of Ammiano came from my friends. Theirs was a slightly more socially acceptable kind of a gripe, expressed in private, though the issue did surface in the press. The issue was Ammiano’s voice. One gay voter I know cited this as a key reason he remained undecided the weekend before the election.

“I know it isn’t something we’re supposed to talk about in this community, but I just can’t get past his demeanor,” complained this friend. “He just sounds silly.” People could be heard fretting over what an “embarrassment” Ammiano would be to the city. Again and again I heard it, from gays and straights alike: How could we have a mayor with “that voice”?

Over the past several weeks I have spent a lot of time listening to Tom Ammiano’s voice. The first time in this campaign it was at a debate before the San Francisco Neighborhood Coalition, at which Brown was a no-show. Ammiano spoke to the group, uninterrupted except by questions and applause, for most of an hour. He was articulate, his answers were detailed and direct, his solutions were innovative, his grievances against the current administration were compelling, and his sympathies were clear. And his voice, the source of so much anxiety and discontent, was that of a big queen.

But I did not find the candidate silly. I found him credible, passionate, knowledgeable, high-minded and apart from a few quips immensely serious. I was not embarrassed, either as a San Franciscan, or as a gay man. “My voice may be high, my orientation may be gay, my politics may be left,” Ammiano told his weary, devoted and unembarrassed supporters last night.

“But we are right, and we have moved San Francisco. We have been the voice for people who have been shut out and we will be shut out no more!”

It’s fine rhetoric, but is it true? If even the gay voters in this city can’t vote for a gay candidate who — like Willie Brown — sounds like what he is, how genuine is our liberalism?

Still, most of the voters I encountered in the campaign appeared to be making their decision based on issues rather than skin color or voice. And it was these more thoughtful types I found volunteering on the campaign, a genuinely diverse group — disproportionately but far from monolithically gay — inspired by Ammiano’s astonishing second-place finish in the general election to believe that voters were not helpless in the face of multimillion dollar campaigns.

Whatever got Ammiano’s thousands of volunteers through the door of the campaign offices, it kept many coming back for the duration of the run-off. For some, giving time was the only way to fight back against the torrent of money lavished on the Brown campaign by the Democratic Party machine. Soft money contributions to Brown were expected to top $1 million.

Ammiano spent $20,000 on his last-minute write-in campaign to win a quarter of the vote, forcing Tuesday’s run-off. Final campaign expenditures won’t be reported until next month, but early reports showed Brown dwarfing Ammiano in campaign spending.

These volunteers, like me, were fired up not about race or sexual orientation but about economic issues that have become acute problems for anyone who doesn’t own property or a pile of stock options in an overhyped Internet start-up. San Francisco’s growing pains have become a national story.

As the Internet economy continues to drive rents and house prices to astronomical levels, as evictions rise, as congestion chokes the city and surrounding areas, longtime San Franciscans and hopeful newcomers alike find they are being squeezed out of an increasingly homogeneous, monied city. Many of us find ourselves half hoping for the earthquake to come and scare some of this prosperity away. Tom Ammiano unseating Willie Brown seemed like the next best thing.

“So what attracted you to Ammiano’s candidacy?” I asked a woman last night after we’d finished calling voters right up to the 8 p.m. poll closure. She mutely pointed to the button on her lapel. It read: “Another terrified tenant for Tom.” Most volunteers I queried cited similar bread-and-butter issues. Roughly half said that Ammiano’s integrity was what drew them to the campaign.

Another combustible element fueling Ammiano’s popular support was the perception that Brown’s City Hall has been a four-year free-for-all for well-heeled corporate lobbyists. A fat target for Brown opponents has been his close advisor Jack Davis (gay guy, incidentally), who was revealed to have earned $330,000 from Home Depot in order to lobby the mayor to approve the chain’s expansion into San Francisco. Ammiano, a staunch defender of neighborhood businesses against the encroachment of chain stores, refuses to meet with paid lobbyists.

I was drawn into the campaign first by the idea of having a citizen mayor, someone who rode Muni instead of limousines, someone who listened to renters and neighborhood activists rather than big landlords, big corporations and their lobbyists. What helped keep me there was the energy of the Ammiano offices: disorganized sites of passionate arguments, littered with hand-lettered signs, cobbled together with borrowed equipment, they were a time-warp to the political bunkers of the 1970s, where my sister and I could be found tagging along with my mother on her feminist and abortion rights crusades.

The spirit of political activism and street theater, which apart from ACT-UP all but disappeared in the 1980s under the twin burdens of Reaganism and AIDS, is a large part of the San Francisco I grew up in and loved. It was thought to have received its final death blow from the ultracapitalism of the Internet economy, so it took many of us by surprise when it resurfaced with the Ammiano candidacy.

Spirit, it turns out, will be our consolation. Ammiano lost, and badly. But this reluctant candidate met his original campaign goals. Concerned that the rogues gallery of mayoral candidates in November’s general election gave progressive voters no reason to go to the polls, Ammiano stepped into the race at the last minute as a write-in candidate with the stated purpose of ensuring passage of a number of lefty ballot measures and helping liberal incumbent district attorney Terence Hallinan in his troubled bid for reelection.

The gambit worked, and the D.A. owed Ammiano again last night, as the very last precincts reporting showed him pulling ahead of his more conservative challenger Bill Fazio by a hair’s breadth, buoyed by progressives who came to the polls to support Ammiano. (A final tally is expected later this week.)

The question now is how to retain the momentum of the Ammiano campaign. Looking beyond the season’s electoral goals, queer, neighborhood and other liberal activists could be heard, even as the numbers came in spelling out Ammiano’s defeat, planning how to consolidate and resuscitate the insurgent campaign’s organization for the next progressive cause.

In addition to laying the groundwork for future campaigns, the success of the Ammiano write-in and the sheer energy of the scrappy campaign should remind the local Democratic machine that the left cannot be taken for granted. As the candidate said last night to cheering supporters, “We have moved a mountain. The mountain is still there, but we have moved it.”

Horowitz’s problem is that he is looking at the African-American community as a foot-marching, sign-carrying Borg creature willing to follow
anyone that calls himself a black leader and raise a clarion call to
“blame Whitey.” The fact that many of us have not voiced our opinion in
the Decatur situation demonstrates that we are not a unimind marching in lockstep. Some of us may agree with Jackson’s actions but many of us don’t; sometimes silence is the best rebuke.

– Alvin McEwen

Jesse Jackson’s diatribe against the Decatur school system has already received far more
press than Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s ties to the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. Racism is, you know, so OVER. Except when it is perpetuated by blacks.

Yes, black racism is helping to drive a wedge between whites and blacks
who no doubt want the same things out of life. But that wedge has existed
since the first Africans were brought to this continent as slaves. To
blame the racial climate of the United States solely on black Americans, as Horowitz
seems to do, is specious and revisionist, to say the least, and a
form of conservative-approved political correctness. You know why George
Bush won’t criticize Pat Buchanan? Because the Republican Party needs the
white bigot vote in order to survive.

– David Dunne

Lately, there seems to be a rash of people who think that expulsion is a viable answer.
I find this loony: How will these young people ever change their ways if the best answer a room full of supposedly educated people can come up with is “kick them out”?

Work with these kids; try to make some kind of difference. Kicking them out is just
giving them an express ticket to a terrible life. It doesn’t make any
sense to remove misbehaving kids from anyone who would hold
them accountable, That’s a death warrant in cities like D.C., where almost 50 percent of
black male teenagers are in prison or awaiting trial.

– Brian Thomas

The “riot” David Horowitz refers to, while ugly, was a fistfight which apparently
lasted less than a minute and resulted in no injuries. For that, the
students were expelled for two years. Even the Grand Dragon of the KKK, who
showed up to exploit the situation, said the punishment was obviously too harsh.
Also, the Decatur school board did not, as required by law, present the
students with options for alternative education.

It should also be noted that these so-called criminals faced no charges
until Jackson came to Decatur, and law enforcement decided, two months
after the fact, that the kids had better be charged with something to make the
two-year expulsions look a little less extreme.

– John Soloman

David Horowitz wrote: “A month ago, for example, even as the trial of
Matthew Shepard’s homophobic killer was concluding, two homosexuals — one
black, the other white — raped and murdered an adolescent white youngster.
There was little or no news coverage of this incident, no national
hand-wringing over a politically incorrect hate crime. Do we need a white
heterosexual civil rights movement to redress this injustice?”

Horowitz leaves one thing out of his discussion: context.
The murder of this child was a heinous crime, and my heart goes out to his
family. But the crime did not take place in a context of organized hate campaigns
directed at young boys. There are no organizations claiming that young boys are unnatural and
contrary to God and that society would be better off without them.
There are no religious groups pointing out that the Bible insists that young
boys should be murdered. There is no “kid panic defense” being used by defense attorneys.

The media focus on Matthew Shepard was on the link between his
murder and the hatred of gays so common in mainstream society.
That doesn’t make the adolescent’s murder any less evil. But it does call into question
why Horowitz is using it to bash civil rights for gays and lesbians.

– Bennet Marks

Why is David Horowitz’s rant about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton
prominently labeled News at the head of the page? Reads like an old-fashioned editorial to me. Even if I didn’t think Horowitz was a zealot, I’d still be irked by the fluffy presentation by which his hot air is presented as fact.

– Jeff Sharlet

Sharps & Flats: “The Battle of Los Angeles”
BY GAVIN McNETT
(11/22/99)

Gavin McNett’s argument against Rage Against the Machine swings on what –
a high school student who doesn’t understand the band’s message?
It might be possible to dismiss the band as more style than substance if Rage was just the loud music and nifty guitar riffs. However, Rage Against the Machine has always included lyrics with their albums.

In the liner notes for “The Battle of Los Angeles,” an “Action”
page is included, with Web site links and contact information for
organizations the band supports. On the Rage Web site you can find a link to the “RATM Reading List,” which includes a complete inventory of books depicted in a photograph from the liner notes of “Evil Empire,” Rage’s second album.

For anybody who wants to know what Rage are all about, the
information is there for the uptake. Rage do as much as any group I
know to explain their music.

As for the teacher McNett describes: What kind of educator throws his
hands up and walks away the first time a student misunderstands an idea?
Why not take a lecture and explain why Zack really is so mad at America?

– Russell Gordon

Gavin McNett has it all wrong regarding Rage’s
political effect, basing his entire case on one kid who doesn’t even
know the definition of imperialism. Of course there are some kids who just listen to Rage for the hard rock, who don’t pay attention to the lyrics or the message. They’re
probably the majority. But I know for certain that Rage have created a few
activists, and with their great new album, they are sure to create more.

– Sam Brody

I told you once …
BY CHRISTOPHER SANDLUND

(11/23/99)

Christopher Sandlund has to tell Steve Case again because the last time he told him (December ’98), he agreed to a one-year contract. The agreement for e-mail and pop-up windows
explicitly states that it’s only good for one year and then the system reverts to
the defaults. (The mail and phone agreements are good for 10 years.) Why
is he complaining now about something he agreed to last year?

– Andrew Hughey

Having been with AOL for many years, I am now at the
point of joining the league of unhappy soon-to-be-non-subscribers. The
level of XXX-rated e-mail soared and could not be shut off, even when
attempting to use “tosspam”; after re-setting the pseudo-filters to
the very lowest age, I continued to receive the solicitations, but my
non-AOL friends could no longer send me e-mail. I have many friends who
have also been migrating to other servers for their better filtration.
Time to wake up.

– Dan D. Carda

Christopher Sandlund surely must be sophisticated enough to understand that it
is apathy like his that keeps AOL afloat to begin with. Why else would so
many Internet users put up with such shoddy service? I know that it can be a daunting prospect for someone who’s never used a local Internet service to give up that familiar AOL interface, but Sandlund has no valid excuse. He doesn’t want to give up his AOL
address? He doesn’t even use it to have e-mail forwarded to him by Salon.
Hear those giddy chuckles off in the distance? It’s the
sound of Steve Case counting Sandlund’s money.

– Robert Wade Bess

The bald facts
BY JOHN F. MURPHY

(11/22/99)

Frankly, what worries me is not what is on top of the heads of congressmen
and women — it’s what is in their heads that worries me.

– Mary Colins

As a research scientist, I know that when you’re doing statistical
calculations, the math can get pretty hairy. Nonetheless, I was disturbed
by the author’s mistakes in finding the percentage of male U.S. senators
with toupees, transplants, weaves or hairpieces. The root of the problem
is an error in basic division: The author says that of the 88 male
senators whose pictures he found, between 10 and 22 are committing
follicular fraud. By dividing, you will find that 10 out of 88 equals 11
percent, and 22 out of 88 equals 25 percent. However, the article
incorrectly states that “10 to 22 percent of all our male senators have
engaged in some sort of cover up.” While this is not a bald-faced lie, it
is off by more than a hair. The correct range is 11 to 25 percent of the
male senators.

– Tim Marks

San Diego

“Drop the Chalupa, Al Gore!”
BY ANTHONY YORK

(11/20/99)

For years, Hispanics were second-class citizens in the eyes of many
Republicans. They probably still are, but their numbers have grown,
so now the GOP wants to court Hispanic votes. Meanwhile, Democrats, without courting any votes, have seen the need all along to create programs that would support the Hispanic
population. How unfortunate that some Hispanics will
betray those who have been their friends for years in order to support
those who promise much and give naught.

– Teresa Simon-Noble

It will be difficult for the GOP to attract the Hispanic vote, because the
GOP is out for those who want to protect what they have — not for those in need.
Government spending on social programs is what poor Latinos need. Try to
tell the country-club set, the people who write $1,000 checks to the
Republican candidate du jour, that they need to help the immigrant and the
poor Latino. Watch the money dry up.

The GOP will get the Hispanic, but will have to wait until he has something to
protect. Look at the suburban Irish- and Italian-Americans on Long Island. They were
all Democrats when they needed something from the government. Now they sound like a bunch of rednecks with golf clubs.

– John Burns Jr.

Binghamton, N.Y.

Bush channels Reagan on foreign policy
BY MARK DENNIS

((11/20/99)

Dubya can’t even read a speech written by committee. Are we really
supposed to elect a leader of the free world who consistently
mispronounces “nuclear” as “nucular” — 38 times in five minutes?
He’s either too stupid to know better, or too arrogant to care.

Mark Dennis’ pointed and insightful take on Dubya’s foreign policy speech
is more accurate than he knows. No wonder Dubya’s handlers won’t let him out on his own, off-script. Even on-script, he’s still a dunce — another willing B-list front-man for the far more sinister and monied entities who have been obsessed for nearly eight years with overturning Clinton’s election.

– Robert Glass

Maybe I should buy you a globe for Christmas
BY ROBERT PARRY
(11/20/99)

I would suggest the editors buy Robert Parry a dictionary. The first
definition of the word “Grecian” is “a native of Greece.” Who is stupid now?

– Geraldine K. Smith