Here's hoping that Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker holds onto his newfound rage over his city's crime rates. A recent column in the Newark Star-Ledger lays out the stark reality that has turned this Zen-y, post-race, teetotaling philosopher, Rhodes scholar, Stanford football star and Yale Law grad into Martin Luther King Jr. If he doesn't see progress soon, we may be heading for Malcom X territory. A year into his mayoralty, Booker's million and one grad school-infused plans to save Newark have come to naught and will continue to do so as long as the war on drugs remains a war on the urban poor.

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With Bruce Gordon's recent departure as president after just 19 months and the recent announcement that the NAACP is shuttering its regional offices, the future does not look bright for the nation's oldest advocacy organization.

Back in the late '90s, I was fresh out of law school and raring to take on the system with the tools that NAACP and other civil rights leaders had won for me. Working in D.C. at the time, I remember seeing a photo of then NAACP president Kweisi Mfume in the paper. I was transfixed by the reverential image of him being arrested outside the Supreme Court during a protest against the dearth of black law clerks -- an essential steppingstone for young lawyers wanting to enter the upper reaches of the legal profession. Eyes closed, on his knees, handcuffed, he looked with beatific stoicism to the heavens, à la Dr. King en route to the Birmingham jail. A shot for the ages.

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Roth, the leader of a wannabe movement called National Action Against Obesity, was surely praying that LaKisha Jones would win "American Idol," so she could make her the poster girl for the nation's obesity epidemic. Jones, for all that heavenly voice, was actually obese, whereas bubbly belter Jordin Sparks is merely kittenishly chubby. No matter. Roth was camped out at Fox News before Sparks finished the song that got her into the finals. Her message? Skinny Blake Lewis should win (a singing contest) because Sparks, according to Roth's warped standards, is fat. Won't someone please think of the children?

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Damn it all, Michelle Obama has quit her $215,000 dream job and demoted herself to queen. Though the party line is that she's only "scaled back" to a 20 percent workload, I doubt her former co-workers will bother alerting her to many staff meetings. She's traded in her solid gold résumé, high-octane talent and role as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals to be a professional wife and hostess.

Now, the energy and drive that had her up jogging before dawn and a gratifying day of work and family will mainly be spent smiling for the cameras. Just as we watch curvy, healthy-looking singers and actresses like Lindsay Lohan become anorexic too-blonde hoochies before our very eyes, so we're now in danger of having to watch the political version of that process: Any day now, Michelle Obama's handlers will have her glued into one of those Sunday-go-to-meeting Baptist grandma crown hats while smiling vapidly for hours at a time. When, of course, she's not staring moonstruck, à la Nancy Reagan, at her moon doggie god-husband who's not one bit smarter than she is.

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This is perhaps the hardest letter I've ever had to write. I've started it again and again but I know now that I'll never get it right, so just let me stumble my way through, OK? Please don't make this any harder than it has to be.

Your Savage Love sex advice column not only made me a better lover but a better person. You introduced me to people, places and things I would have never otherwise been aware of. You were my secret gay crush for five years. Or you used to be. But, sadly, this is both a fan letter and a Dear John, Dear Dan. It's over and it's better this way. You'll see. No, please, Dan -- it's not you. It's me. But I'm hoping we can still be friends.

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Say you didn't authorize it (or gloat) when your henchmen pulled down your elder's pants in public and tried to humiliate the Rev. Al Sharpton in the pages of the New York Post. Whatever Senator Obama thinks of a figure as controversial as Sharpton, black America must demand that he use his position to send a forceful message that neither mudslinging nor extortion will be the hallmarks of a historically disenfranchised group that has long condemned whites for their disgraceful political behavior. Just what the world needs -- more proof that power corrupts. With black support still in play among the leading Democratic contenders, rest assured they'll be watching to see how Obama responds to his supporters' attempts to marginalize (through the white media, no less) those blacks with the temerity not to worship him instantly as the anointed one.

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You can understand why our eyes might get to rolling whenever somebody draped in kente cloth pops his trunk to reveal Charmin boxes full of his self-published, typo-ridden musings on white folks. (Remember the nonsense-spouting, self-"educated" inmate played by Damon Wayans on "In Living Color"? Imagine he wrote a book.) That the offering, as with Tavis Smiley's surprise blockbuster "The Covenant With Black America," is professionally published and attached to well-known black names does little to assuage skeptical minds: Nobody knows better than blacks how much money is to be made and how much power to be gained by claiming to speak for us, by claiming to channel our demands and to express our pain. The healthy livings that untalented and/or unscrupulous black carpetbaggers make (instead of the hardscrabble lives of the grass-roots activists who actually do the community's heavy lifting) are too often the "protection" money America pays to keep the racial peace.

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The men get "Jarhead," a hauntingly beautiful and disturbing recounting of the Gulf War by former Marine Anthony Swofford, a man incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. Chicks get "Love My Rifle More Than You" by 28-year-old Kayla Williams, a woman incapable of writing a complete sentence, though she had a ghostwriter, Michael E. Staub. The book follows Williams -- who joined the Army Reserve in 2000 to train as an interpreter -- the whole way to Iraq, where she was deployed as an Arabic linguist. There are tidbits of good writing and sound insight strewn like gold nuggets here and there, but it's up to the reader to gut it out, like a five-mile hike in full battle gear, to find them.

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There were few specific instances that led to my distaste for and disapproval of blacks; there was just the self-hatred I did not yet recognize which made me want them to disappear. Unless, of course, they acted just like me. Blacks were hypervisible, or at least they were to me, and I was constantly vigilant for signs of our group failure. Like a member of the white citizens' councils opposing the civil rights movement, I kept close tabs on our dangerous activities.

It was clear to me that black people chose not to work very hard in the military. Why else would so few number among the linguists, the commandos, the pilots, the officers, the academy grads? You couldn't enter a military administrative office without finding enough Negroes working there to make a Tarzan movie and it always embarrassed me. I expressed my embarrassment as annoyance. That's their choice, I thought; they might just as easily have chosen a more challenging field, but they'd rather simply take up space.

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Given the book's commendable grasp, the only remaining question is how Evanzz could withstand the mudslide of murder, incest and stupidity facing anyone who tries to make sense of this mishmash religion that, for all its incoherent hatred, has brought 4 million black Americans to (something like) Islam. Reading about the weak, lethal and fanatically anti-intellectual leaders of the NOI made me want to wash my mind out with soap. This all goes double, of course, for the government counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) agents who worked so hard from as early as the 1940s to foment both political and actual fratricide among black activists, from the NOI's chaotic prototypes to the saintly (though libidinous) Martin Luther King and on to the nihilistic Elijah Muhammad himself. Few emerge from this sordid tale deserving to hold their heads up.

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From 1980 to 1992, I was on active duty in the United States Air Force. My last overseas assignment was as chief of intelligence for Ankara Air Station, Turkey, a NATO-affiliated base. I got there in June 1989. When I left in late 1990, we were at war with our wacky neighbor to the south, Iraq. I rotated back to the world, and the Pentagon, and remained involved in the war effort till its conclusion. The war affected me in ways that I would never have predicted and have yet to effectively communicate to civilians and the unreconstructed liberals who expect me to be conflicted over my involvement.

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"It's the 'no harm, no foul' approach," says Daniel Williams, one of two lead attorneys defending Abu-Jamal. "The presumption of innocence only applies before a conviction. Now we have the affirmative burden of creating a very real doubt that Mumia ever had a chance. We have to show not that the trial was unfair in technical terms, but rather that it was so qualitatively unfair overall that had the unfairness not occurred, there's a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different."

"They have to show that something was horribly wrong, so horribly unfair they couldn't prove whatever it was they were trying to prove," agrees Assistant District Attorney Hugh Burns, from his vantage on the prosecution team.

So,were there horrible wrongs in Abu-Jamal's first trial?

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Whatever the truth of the matter, the dreadlocked Mumia (so famous that
he's now down to just one name) is a potent reminder that we're far from
through with the past when it comes to racial politics in America.

Centuries of racism, and the corrupt government structures that
enforced it, are still a radioactive part of our living memory and will remain so for at least another generation. That means there will almost
certainly be more of these racial cause cilhbres in our future. After all, we've only had one generation since the triumphs of the civil rights movement to unlearn 350 years of hate and mutual suspicion.

Maybe it's because we're still wearing our egalitarian training wheels that
the overarching issue of the role that race plays in the Mumia case has
eclipsed other critical questions that bear analysis in their own right.

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As Gordon makes clear in writing so alive that it makes the reader smell sagebrush and white supremacy, the Eastern nuns didn't realize that, in turn-of-the-century Arizona, Catholic also meant Mexican, and Mexican meant inferior. How could a dirty, amoral Mexican (terms that were among the nicer descriptions of the would-be foster parents in newspaper accounts and sworn testimony) raise a white child? To Western whites, the nuns were depraved white-slavers selling children to drunken-whore savages.

Local whites (nearly all Protestant, and therefore ineligible to receive the sisters' charges) rioted and "liberated" the children from their Mexican foster parents, all of whom had been carefully vetted by the local (white) priest in accordance with the Sisters of Charity's well-established system. Many white Arizonans concocted stories claiming they'd seen
Mexicans pay a priest on receipt of a child, or claiming that the sisters promised them children if they'd ante up. As Gordon plausibly sees it, these manufactured memories helped them to make sense of why another white would deliver helpless white children to the clutches of near-animals -- and also legitimized their "rescue" of the children.

The sisters sued to win back the children, promising that they'd be placed with Catholic, and -- having learned their lesson -- white parents. Indeed, the sisters abandoned the Mexicans entirely, claiming they would have never given the children to them had they "known." Interestingly, the suits were all civil; no criminal charges were ever entertained, let alone filed, against the vigilantes, although they were kidnappers whose treatment of the sisters and the Mexicans was brutal. When the mob first came for the sisters to "voluntarily" give up the children, 100 people crowded into their hotel lobby, with 300 more outside threatening the nuns with tar and feathers. Many were armed, and several called for a rope.

"In the street a sheriff sat on horseback, with a revolver, like the other men," one sister later wrote. "Women called us vile names, and some of them put pistols to our heads. They said there was no law in that town; that they made their own laws. We were told to get the children from the Spaniards [meaning the Mexicans, a difference the sisters could not understand] ... If we did not we would be killed."

The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where, unsurprisingly, whites' right to protect their racial purity, their societal supremacy and their right to state-sanctioned violence remained sacrosanct. The "rescued" children grew up with nice, white criminals as parents and role models, across the tracks from their erstwhile Mexican-American parents, none of whom were allowed to testify, file written statements or even enter the courtroom. The great orphan abduction -- in which Mexican-Americans tried to do the right thing and were nearly massacred for it -- was settled entirely among whites.

For the sisters, who back home had to vie with Protestant charities for the souls of New York's numerous street urchins, religion was all that mattered. As she relates the story of the orphans' fate, Gordon patiently describes the tortured, complex systems of racial categorization that prevailed in different parts of the country. In New York, "Irish" was a separate and reviled race not much above "Negro" or "Slav." The orphans' Irish status, coupled with their sheer numbers (150 more were abandoned every month) made it impossible to find enough adoptive homes in the children's hometown, or even in a nearby state. The activist (and quite feminist) sisters understood that the abandoned children had their best chance at a future in the labor-starved hinterlands, where they were a much-needed resource. The sisters failed to realize, however, that in a sparsely populated region without many gradations among what we now think of as "white," "race" meant very different things.

In Arizona, all social significance hinged on the differences between "whites" and the inferiors: Mexicans, "Chinamen," blacks and Indians. Closest to white in appearance and comportment, Mexicans were at the top of the list but remained (then as now) non-white. Intermarriage (or more often, intercourse) between whites and Mexicans was common and largely accepted in the Southwest, but there were limits -- Mexicans adopting white children, for instance. Gordon's convincing analysis of the nuns' mistake and the debacle that followed points up some potent racial ironies that are still worth savoring today: The Easterners didn't understand that the same train ride that would bring their Irish charges parents and homes would also make them white. Of course, had they been white in New York, there would have been no need for the arduous journey west.

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Now that high-profile black Republicans like Colin Powell and J.C. Watts have emerged to lead the way, it would seem logical that rank-and-file blacks would feel comfortable rejoining their historic home in the party of Lincoln.

But so far, public-opinion polls show little evidence of such a trend, although a growing number of blacks do seem to be identifying themselves as independents. Whites have been moving away from the parties as well, but not at nearly the same speed.

Blacks make up about 10 percent of the electorate and still vote overwhelmingly Democratic (89 percent in the 1998 elections), so the issue is not so much that they are switching parties; it's that they're ditching parties altogether.

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[The headline] reveals a heightened sensitivity to race and ethnicity but
an ineptness in dealing with race and ethnicity. By most
accounts, his race was no more the deciding factor in his victory than was
Serena Williams's in hers in the U.S. Open this month. Thankfully, The Post
did not declare then that "Black Girl Wins."

What an ingeniously seductive analogy! Too bad, however, that the situations aren't analogous. The outcome of the U.S. Open is news regardless of who the winner is, but if Martin O'Malley (the new Democratic nominee and shoo-in for mayor) were black rather than white, few outside of Baltimore would have noticed. His whiteness was, in fact, the news.

Yet, most of us would agree with Shipp that something seems wrong about communicating this news so nakedly with that headline. The reasons we feel this way are revealing about the state of public dialogue about race these days.

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This neighborhood's name tells you pretty much everything you need to know about it. It's a high-density, low-income area of crumbling, pocket-sized houses, propped up on concrete blocks, filled with people who aren't going anywhere. Men aged 18 to 60, shirtless and shoeless, hold down the porches in the middle of the day, with postures that speak of uninterrupted idleness. They brush their hair, brush their teeth,and just hang out. That's it.

There are a number of well-tended homes here too, but somehow, they only highlight the desolation that's all around. One common sight is a pregnant 15-year-old pushing a stroller down the street. Not-yet-pregnant 15- year-olds hold down the corners, laughing and joking with their boyfriend-pimps as they wait for paying customers.

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That's because the California Supreme Court forbade the future use of racial slurs in a workplace that has already been found by a court to be a hostile environment and likely to remain so.

While the decision is not binding outside of California, or on the federal courts, it is extremely significant nonetheless. Until now, a racist's worst nightmare was being penalized for his past behavior, but now he can be legally muzzled to prevent his invective from spewing forth in the first place.

As early as 1991, Avis service agent John Lawrence allegedly began informing his Latino subordinates that they were "wetbacks," "motherfuckers" and "crooks" and routinely demeaning their English language skills, among his many other insults.

Seventeen of them took Avis and Lawrence, who denies the allegations, to court. In 1995, a jury found in the workers' favor, awarding eight of them a total of $150,000 in damages. In addition, Judge Carlos Bea enjoined Lawrence (who still has his job) from engaging in further such speech, and enjoined Avis from allowing him to.

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"[Government] must act in the common good," he said, "and that good is not common until it is shared by those in need." He went on: "In every instance where my administration sees a responsibility to help people, we will look first to faith-based organizations, charities and community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives," he said.

First? Maybe Bush should be running for president of the United Way instead of president of the United States.

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