Uptown Notes

In my obligatory glancing at the Daily, I only look to insure that we are not being scewed over again by some horrible slander or mislead opinion piece, I think I may have come across a decent opinion piece. The opinion is entitled, “Necessary but not sufficient.” The piece suggests Affirmative Action can only be a partial solution to racial inequality because it does not affect as many people as it should. Not a bad thought, now of course it commits the cardinal sin in my book- “We need more/better/different techniques,” but then suggests none. It’s a pretty common thing, but hey it’s a think piece.

About a month ago, Africana ran a column by William Jelani Cobb, a history professor at Spelman. The column argued that the Willie Lynch address never happened. The argument againts Lynch’s existence is very sound, despite the occasional inaccuracy about the points of origin of the alleged speech. This is the type of critical inquiry that we need about the history that we have been told, and sometimes we have created, or others have created for us. In response, Africana has launched a new column by Cobb entitled “Past Imperfect.”

And before I forget, I noticed that the Rush Limbaugh coment got a lot of attention nationally and eventually sent the man packing . . . and possibly to rehab, coincidence? But the recent comments by Jan Stephenson have remained relatively unknown. Stephenson said,

“This is probably going to get me in trouble, but the Asians are killing our tour. Absolutely killing it,” she told the magazine. “Their lack of emotion, their refusal to speak English when they can speak English. They rarely speak. We have two-day pro-ams where people are paying a lot of money to play with us, and they say, ‘Hello and goodbye.’ Our tour is predominantly international and the majority of them are Asian. They’ve taken it over.”

For real? Well of course, now she has also apologized to the APIA community. I guess the magic words of “I’m sorry” are still good enough for the masses.

Fin