So, if you haven’t heard, Obama’s drinking Bud Light at tonight’s “Beer Summit,” which brings together Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Sergeant James Crowley in an attempt to seize a “teachable moment” on race relations.

Unfortunately, if this moment is teaching us anything about race in America, it’s that we don’t know how to talk about it and don’t really want to talk about it (Stephen Colbert made this point with his usual brilliant satire). Oh, and that the right-wing reactionaries in America still love to exploit all that unease (Joan Walsh has the best take on Glenn Beck and company).

The real “teachable moment” here is the opportunity to show what a screwed-up relationship Americans — especially American men — have with beer. And how easy it is to fix that relationship — by staying local and trusting craftsmanship over marketing.  I’ve said this before.

And Obama is just the one to do it. He has already showed his preference for microbrews — at parties and at the White House. And he clearly has a sophisticated palate — considering his favorite restaurants, chefs and foodie friends as well as the people he has chosen to take the lead on food policy (especially USDA Under Secretary Kathleen Merrigan).

And he chooses Bud Light? Pandering would be an understatement. Some image maker appears to be telling him he needs to up his NASCAR-Dad credentials. How sad. I really didn’t plan to have to say that about Obama — at least so soon.

For your information, Bud Light receives a D- from Beeradvocate.com and is in the “0″ percentile (that would be out of a 100) on the ratebeer.com scale. Of course, Red Stripe (Gates’ choice) doesn’t fare much better.  Blue Moon gets mediocre ratings (putting aside that it’s a MillerCoors product) — but oh, there are so many better American craft-brewed Belgian white ales out there!

Oops, I lapsed into beer snobbery there. But it’s really not about drinking hoity-toity beer. It’s about honoring authenticity and complexity over a manufactured narrative that can be overwhelming, especially for those of us who have had to sit through the endless line of juvenile beer ads while watching a sporting event on TV.

That narrative, centered around young, goofy men ogling young, goofy women while a “drinkable” beverage loosens them all up, divorces the experience of drinking beer from its production (which is an art form when done right) and the communal enjoyment of its taste (which a site like ratebeer.com or a booth a your local gastropub — we love you, Hopleaf! — revels in).

And it’s not as if Obama didn’t know there were plenty of beers out there that could have allowed him to step outside that narrative without losing credability. Jack Nicas of the Boston Globe reports on how Boston brewers made their case to be the beer of choice at the meeting — emphasizing how all three participants had Boston connections. Matt Simpson, a “beer sommelier” who writes the “Ask Beer” column for Beer Magazine (which, to digress and paraphrase that ol’ saying, tries have to have its traditional beer narrative and drink its craft beers too), made the rounds with his own recommendations in interviews with NPR and ABC.

That ABC News article also interviews Anthony Bowker from Goose Island, who makes the case for a beer from his (and Obama’s) local Chicago brewery — possibly, he notes, 312 Urban Wheat Ale (a summer fave of mine as well).

Personally, I’d take the Chicago angle as well, but I’d recommend that Obama show his support for an up-and-coming small business … who happens to make the best damn lagers on the planet. That would Metropolitan Brewing, which is quickly making a name for itself on the north side of Chicago. Their Flying Wheel Bright Lager is a perfect choice for a summer day.

A very “teachable beer,” one might say.

In an article published in PopPolitics magazine, Sarah Yahm ponders why the reincarnated “Battlestar Galactica,” a show that consistently raised complex and challenging questions over its four seasons, decided to fall back on pat answers in its devastatingly reactionary series finale:

Frederick Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, argues that pop culture consistently provides us with interesting rich alternatives to the status quo and then in the end rejects them. We can escape into alternate (even at times radical) possibilities without actually having to challenge our own cultural system. Because of pop culture, we can go to Oz while simultaneously renewing our commitment to not leave Kansas.

I know I wasn’t alone in hoping that “Battlestar Galactica” was going to break that pattern. Throughout the past four seasons, “Battlestar” has consistently raised rigorous questions about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the importance of community, the definition of family, and the correct relationship between humans and technology.

I had faith the writers were going to resolve these questions in the only way possible — by not resolving them at all and instead forcing us to continue to grapple with them alone. They weren’t going to raise questions and then give us pat answers, I insisted. Frederick Jameson was one smart cookie but he was wrong about “Battlestar.”

But sadly, Jameson was right once again, because Ron Moore gave us some really pat answers. He retreated to an old but faithful amalgam –- the purity of nature, monotheism, the sanctity of traditional hetero families, and, yikes, colonial expansion

Continue reading “Is Lee Adama the New (And Not So Improved) Thomas Jefferson?  Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica Finale.”

As the nation prepares for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States (Henry Aaron’s number, though I have not seen that referenced), I am struck by how much has been written about the changes in American society that have prepared the United States for this moment.

The New York Times today has a piece on how the fictional presidencies of Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert, among others, and 50 years of various film representations, have helped Americans to imagine Obama’s breakthrough. There have been articles about how the music industry has transformed how Americans think about African Americans, and numerous comments on the significance of the civil rights movement in preparing for this moment. And there has been more than a little discussion of the role sports has played.

All of these have an element of truth to them, all have been catalytic, but none of them are singular in their power.

Over the past week I have been drawn to the events surrounding the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — past and present — and contemplating the meaning of change in that small corner of American life.

A few of you may remember that on several occasions I wrote disparagingly about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, their ownership, their fans, and the city. I explained their woeful incompetence by The Curse of Doug Williams which was visited upon them after Buc owner Hugh Culverhouse let Williams go to the USFL, refusing to pay Williams anything approaching what he was worth.

The Curse was also payback to all those Buc fans that showered Williams with racial insults every time he set foot on the field in Tampa Stadium, even though he led the Bucs to the playoffs and the NFC championship game, places the franchise had never been. It was a chorus worthy of the Klan and the lynch mobs of the old South. Williams left after the 1982 season.

By this time, Tony Dungy was beginning his career as a defensive coach in Pittsburgh where he established his reputation as one of the best defensive coaches in football. It took 15 years before Dungy was able to break the racial barrier into a head coaching position in 1996, and when he did it was in Tampa. By then Malcolm Glazer had replaced Hugh Culverhouse as owner, and Doug Williams had gone on to be the MVP of Super Bowl XXII with a record-setting performance leading the Washington Redskins over the Denver Broncos. He was the first African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl.

Dungy quickly established the Bucs as a contender and perennial playoff team. In three years, they played in the NFC championship game. Dungy coached the Bucs to more victories than any coach in their history, a feat he would duplicate in Indianapolis. However, after the 2001 season and a loss in the playoffs, he was fired.

The feeling was he couldn’t get his team over the hump offensively and win a championship. His replacement was Jon Gruden, who the Bucs hired away from the Raiders and for whom they gave up two first-round draft picks, two second-round picks, and $8 million. Gruden led the Bucs to the Super Bowl and an NFL championship the following year, becoming the youngest coach to win a Super Bowl.  As many would point out, Gruden did so with the team crafted by Tony Dungy.

As for Dungy, he was hired almost immediately by the Indianapolis Colts, who he took to the playoffs every year. Dungy was the first black coach to win a Super Bowl when, in 2007, the Colts beat the Bears, who also had a black coach — a former assistant of Dungy’s, Lovie Smith. Dungy was the winningest coach in the history of the Colts. Combined with his record in Tampa, he led his teams to 10 straight playoff appearances, and 11 playoffs in 13 years. Many of Dungy’s former assistant coaches are head coaches across the league.

Whether Dungy faced the racial taunting that Doug Williams endured I do not know, although with his success in Tampa it is hard to imagine he did. What is known is that in the past week, after Jon Gruden was fired as Bucs head coach and his successor, Raheem Morris, was named, the comments were about Morris’ age, 32. Morris is African American and there was little comment about that in reactions to his hiring.

All of this certainly points to the fact that in Tampa — once a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan and a place that made life for an African American quarterback quite miserable — there has been some change. The NFL franchise that cast off the first African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, and the first African American head coach to win a Super Bowl, has now hired their second African American head coach with little comment about the color of his skin.

That all of this has transpired within a week of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States is more than a simple convergence of time and place. It is also less than cause and effect. Perhaps it is one more of those small signs that there are some changes we can believe in.

In other bowl news, a study (pdf) from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida showed that graduation rates of football teams going to bowl games had improved slightly.

It also showed that the gap between the graduation rates for African American football players and white players increased over the past year. The study found that 19 bowl-bound teams graduate less than half their African American players, with half of those teams in BCS bowls in that category.

Oklahoma was the only team to achieve a graduation rate of less than 50 percent for its white athletes. Go Sooners!

This result may in part be explained by findings of another study conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showing that SAT scores for incoming football and basketball players at big-time athletic programs were hundreds of points lower than for the average student admission.

The leader in this category is The University of Florida, where there is a 346-point gap between its football players and the average student. The result is that these athletes find themselves competing in a student body where they are at a considerable disadvantage. Some would argue that the athletes are set up for academic failure in order to ensure athletic success for the university. In a less dishonest time than our own this was termed “exploitation.”

Still, the NCAA insists on using the term “student athlete,” claiming that the athlete is and must be treated like all other students. This invites the question of transfers. Most students can choose a transfer school. Not so for student athletes, who do not have this freedom — their current school can prohibit them from enrolling in certain schools.

A case involving a football player at the University of Miami has brought the policy into focus, as this player has been prohibited from enrolling at a number of other schools in Florida and the Southeast. In the meantime, coaches are free to go wherever they choose.

On the coaching front, this is the season for hiring and firing, which highlights another great failing of the American university: The number of African American coaches continues to wallow in single digits. The inability of institutions of higher education — which educate the next generation of American leaders — to produce any change in this area remains a mark of shame.

We now know that it is easier for an African American to become president of a university, or president of the United States, than it is to become a football coach at most universities.

As the presidential race winds down, you can feel the Republican desperation.

Now, that’s not to say I think this election is a done deal.  I’ve got my phone bank list open in another browser window (Obama’s website couldn’t make it any easier).  So after reading this post — and commenting on it, if you’d like — let’s all get back to work.

But back to the desperation for a moment.  Whether it’s the latest hypocritical (and just plain false) guilt-by-association with Rashid Khalidi or hitching on the Ashley Todd stereotype ride, you sense Republicans are searching for a surprise …. But it’s no surprise that they are hoping, expecting, working to make sure it’s something that plays on those good ol’ racial fears.

Thankfully, this time progressives have been meeting fire with fire — and the mainstream media has not been far behind.  We’re still counting the like of Rachel Maddow and Campbell Brown as mainstream media, right?

On the frontlines has been Stop Dog Whistle Racism! — which has never let any veiled racial attack pass them by.  They define “Dog-Whistle Racism” as “political campaigning or policy-making that uses coded words and themes to appeal to conscious or subconscious racist concepts and frames.”  Suffice to say, they have been plenty busy.

To here the power of their perspective, listen to their “Race in the Race” conference call from this past week.

When this election is over, we need to have a Hall of Fame of media who, like many of the canvassers and other volunteers that are hitting the streets and the phones this weekend, represent a new generation of awareness and activism.

Change isn’t coming.  It’s already here.

Pop quiz time!

The antonym of “Arab” is:

a) decent
b) family man
c) citizen
d) all of the above.

If you, like John McCain, answered “d,” pat yourself on the back. You’ve just earned yourself some praise from unexpected corners — including much of the liberal blogosphere — for finally reining in the vitriol of your most rabid supporters. In this case? By agreeing with a woman in your audience that the word “Arab” is a slur. She pins the word on Obama; McCain says that’s just not nice.

Watch the video.

What’s notable here is that McCain, like everyone in his audience, knew immediately where she was going with this. He knew that to “respect” Obama in this case meant to defend him from the (supposedly heinous) charge of being Arab, and he did this not by saying “actually his father’s family is Luo, from Kenya…” but by calling Obama a decent family man, a moniker he apparently believes no Arab could claim.

Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette, who was present at the event in question, reports that the woman, Gayle Quinnell, said “Arab terrorist,” which would render McCain’s comment more defensible. But in the video there is no indication that Quinnell said “terrorist.” She just said “Arab.” Some have wondered if the word “terrorist” was inaudible. This might be true, but Quinnell keeps speaking after she says the word “Arab,” before McCain reclaims the mike.

I am guessing Cox simply misremembered the exchange: that the words “Arab” and “terrorist” are so thoroughly linked by now that to make the former an adjective of the latter has become second nature.

I heard Chuck Todd report on Meet the Press today that insiders in both campaigns acknowledge that a major factor in Wisconsin and Michigan is an unspoken (and un-pollable) racism from white rural voters — “the Bubba vote.” Todd says that the Obama campaign has a “magic number”: They need to go into election day with a 58 percent majority in the polling in those states, because they are going to lose seven percent of voters who will tell pollsters they are for Obama but who instead will vote their racial fears when they complete the ballot.

What Todd didn’t mention is that this racism isn’t simply a result of a backwards segment of the population; it is being actively fomented by the Republican party and their surrogates. And I’m not talking about intimidating African American voters and others in places like Michigan, where they are threatening to challenge all voters who have received a foreclosure notice on their home (a legally questionable and certainly “mean-spirited” tactic).

No, I’m talking about the distribution of “Obama Waffles” at the Values Voters Summit. It featured a variety of racist portrayals of Obama. While the image on the front recalls classic racist stereotypes, the image of Obama on the top shows him wearing an Arab-like headdress. The image on the back depicts Obama wearing a Mexican sombrero. Joan Lowy of the AP writes:

The box was meant as political satire, said Mark Whitlock and Bob DeMoss, two writers from Franklin, Tenn., who created the mix. They sold it for $10 a box from a rented booth at the summit sponsored by the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council. [...]

While Obama Waffles takes aim at Obama’s politics by poking fun at his public remarks and positions on issues, it also plays off the old image of the pancake-mix icon Aunt Jemima, which has been widely criticized as a demeaning stereotype. Obama is portrayed with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly.

Placing Obama in Arab-like headdress recalls the false rumor that he is a follower of Islam, though he is actually a Christian.

On the back of the box, Obama is depicted in stereotypical Mexican dress, including a sombrero, above a recipe for “Open Border Fiesta Waffles” that says it can serve “4 or more illegal aliens.” The recipe includes a tip: “While waiting for these zesty treats to invade your home, why not learn a foreign language?”

If you want to see how a caricature can legitimately use humor and make a political point, I would suggest Steven Brodner’s illustration of Sarah Palin in a recent New Yorker. BagNews Notes, as usual, has the insightful and convincing analysis:

Palin [...] is a reality show. Sixteen days out, her visage continues to permeate the media sphere, as the electricity — primed by biographical fairy tales tightly bound to visual spin aimed at the right brain — continues to trump the reams of qualifying or damaging information that is streaming out.

The crossed arms on two screens and in the larger caricature reflects her inherent defensiveness and hostility. The fish “that big” and the hand gestures on “Bridge to Nowhere” call out the chronic double speak. The way the eyes track in relation to the angle of her head speaks to how well she knows where the camera is (while the disappearing neck telegraphs the underlying reality of “the empty suit.”)

In real life as well, one can easily sense all this, but still she rolls.

Even though many Democratic activists are calling for it, I’m not yet sure that the Obama campaign needs to meet the Republicans down in the muck. I think the alternative narrative — which keeps them on a high road — might hold the most power, if we can afford to be a little patient.

Regardless, they need to seize control of the narrative. And an image, I’ve heard, can be worth a thousand words.

Before I go join Drinking Liberally to watch tonight’s historic event, a few interesting items on race and the Democratic National Convention:

- Writing in The New York Times earlier this week, Alessandra Stanley notes that while one first was celebrated, another was almost swept under the rug: “Tuesday night was tailored to pay homage to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s barrier-breaking near-miss, yet there was no overt celebration of the bull’s-eye: Barack Obama is poised to be the first African-American presidential nominee.”

Of course, that’s all likely to change tonight — and to be clear, Stanley notes that it’s not so much that the sentiment is missing, but that the campaign has kept such references to a minimum: “While African-Americans on the convention floor — and in the commentators’ booth — express feelings of pride and exhilaration, convention organizers design the pageantry on the air to mute racial distinctions and veil novelty, focused it seems, on reassuring those white viewers who find the 2008 spectacle jarringly different from past ones.”

Surely being told of Michelle Obama’s appreciation for the “Brady Bunch” was part of the calculation. Yet the genuine excitement on the floor of the convention, as well as the diversity of this year’s delegates, is obvious to anyone glued to C-SPAN.

But this is the part in Stanley’s piece that was the real stunner:

Obviously, race is a tripwire topic for television, as Chris Matthews of MSNBC demonstrated all too irrepressibly on Tuesday.

Mr. Matthews said the Obamas are “like the Huxtables,” and praised Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Obama as exceptional role models: “They do everything right. They have great kids, they work their hearts off, they make it in their professions, they don’t live off welfare, they don’t commit crimes, they don’t live on affirmative action.”

His two African-American guests, the seasoned television personalities Ed Gordon and Jeff Johnson, gave him a skeptical look but did not comment.

Plus: Novelist Kim McLarin argues that Michelle Obama’s presence on stage at the convention may be even more transcendent than her husband’s.

- Dawn Turner Trice, a Chicago Tribune columnist who also leads the Exploring Race forum on the paper’s website, has been keeping the discussion going from Denver this week (she’s in row 20 right now at the stadium). Here she asks readers what it means to be an American in the context of race; more here.

- Over at Black Voices, Branden Cobb asks if the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., has been fulfilled. Rep. John Lewis fielded a similar question during a discussion with Michele Norris that aired on “All Things Considered” this evening.

- The DNC has put together this table (PDF) showing the gender and race breakdown of the delegates for all conventions between 1984 and 2008. This year, women came out slightly ahead of men for the first time ever. About 44 percent of the delegates are minorities. For the past three conventions, the DNC has also logged the percentage of delegates who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, and delegates with disabilities — this year it’s 6 percent and 4 percent respectively.

-Here’s Spike Lee making perhaps the most apt assessment of the meaning of Obama’s nomination, defining it in terms of “BB” and “AB”:

The most pressing question in this presidential campaign has become: Why isn’t the Obama campaign (or their surrogates and sympathizers) spreading insidious rumors about John McCain to counterbalance all the junk out there about Obama?

Now, I subscribe to plenty of liberal/lefty e-mail lists — so I feel fairly in touch with the viral pulse out there.  And I know plenty of Obama sympathizers will say that they’re working very hard at getting out the unknown stuff about John McCain.

But my response to them would be that you’re still hampered by this ridiculous need to stay in the realm of truth.

For example, Brave New Films has done a great job of exposing “The Real John McCain.”  In their latest salvo, they reveal that McCain, in fact, is the true elitist.  He and his wife own, among other things, ten mansions:

Others are exposing McCain’s elitism as well.  Isabel Wilkinson over at Huffington Post has noted that McCain has been wearing $520 Ferragamo loafers while campaigning this summer, which, in turn, has produced more fodder for BagnewsNotes, who continues to show how contrasting visual images of an angry and out-of-touch McCain and a genial and engaged Obama tell the true story of each man.

Unfortunately, though McCain’s elitist hypocrisy might scandalize many of us, it doesn’t come across as a threat to the American way of life.  That’s because old, rich white men have always held power in this country.  Strangely, it’s not news — both to the man in the street and the Man in the media.

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You can’t say the word “nigger” or any other “profanity” in Wilmette, Illinois. Or at least you can’t say it when someone else might hear you.

That appears to be the result of a controversy in which the city’s park district refused to allow an open-air production of the musical adaptation of “Ragtime.”

Jim McDonough, jazz critic for the Wall Street Journal, gives a great overview of the controversy and its resolution, which includes a revealing interview with Ty Perry, an African American actor/director who was hired to direct the production:

Mr. Perry, who claims no special authority over Ragtime based on race, sees things quite differently. “If you don’t want people to use the word,” he said, “this is the perfect opportunity to show them why they shouldn’t.” Setting aside euphemism, he quoted examples of its use in the musical. “There is a song in which Coalhouse Walker [the black protagonist] sings the line, ‘I’m not their nigger,’” he says. “And at another point when Willie Conklin [the racist villain] demands a toll, Coalhouse asks, ‘Since when?’ And Conklin says, ‘Since some high falutin’ nigger and his whore could drive that car of theirs any place they please. That’s since when.’”

Mr. Perry adds: “I understand it makes white people nervous, but to take that word out of ‘Ragtime’ would be to invalidate my heritage as an African-American man. I was talking to my partner about this and he said, ‘I can’t understand what you feel when you hear that word.’ And I said, ‘I can never understand the guilt you feel when you hear that word.’ We both have a common bond with that word. So let’s deal with that.”

Even though the park district eventually agreed to stage the production indoors — starting this past Thursday — they still believe “the decision not to do it outdoors was the correct one.” Apparently, they’d rather not “deal with that.”

Plenty is being said about the new New Yorker cover that features Barack Obama in Muslim dress amidst plenty of anti-American symbolism.

The New Yorker is defending it as satire — a mockery of the right-wing distortions of Obama’s background and political leanings.

Obama’s camp is calling it “tasteless and offensive.”

Unfortunately neither side is putting the cultural power of this cover in its full context.

And satire is all about context.

David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, actually said in his defense: “The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are.”

This statement sums up for me why, in fact, the cover is somewhat indefensible. Sure, for subscribers of the New Yorker — they get it. They don’t think the New Yorker is trying to undermine the Obama campaign. They’ve read the “Talk of the Town.”

But in the postmodern age, any responsible publisher in any medium needs to know that their images and words, especially the provocative ones, will disseminate to diverse audiences. That doesn’t mean they should avoid satire — but they should make sure their satire works on a broader levels.

Some have suggested they might have shown the images on the cover coming out of bubble above John McCain’s head or being painted by Rush Limbaugh.

Okay, that might work. But this is an extraordinary case. The rumors of Obama’s religious and national leanings are so insidious, so consciously constructed, that to throw the cover into that cesspool without a more direct refutation of that subtle, viral campaign can’t help but perpetuate the mess.

It all reminds me of John Kerry’s inability to see the power of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. With apologies to Marshall McLuhan — in the present political environment, the image or the soundbite is the message. Trusting in the ability of your audience to just “know” the truth isn’t enough anymore.

Update: Here’s the comprehensive article I had been looking for on the history of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

As a Chicago sports fan, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” has a special place in my heart, having been popularized by Harry Caray when he announced games for both the White Sox and the Cubs.

So I think it’s pretty cool that ESPN is commemorating its 100th anniversary by having a Battle of Bands contest between competing modern versions of the song.

I think it’s even cooler that the ultimate multicultural (and multi-genre) band — Ozomatli — is one of the three finalists:

It reminds me of when I saw the Sones de México Ensemble sing “This Land is Your Land” in Spanish at the Old Town School of Folk Music’s 50th anniversary concert late last year.

Redefining America never sounded so good.

A couple of recent articles tackle the question of race in America from two ends of the cultural spectrum.

Mark de la Vina of the Mercury News discusses how comedians are some of the few people who are actually talking about Barack Obama’s race.

Paul Mooney, a very funny, veteran African American comedian, says Obama present a challenge to white America: “We’ve always had to say, does this white man like us? We’ve always had to think race. And this is the first time white people have had to think race.”

And Roland S. Martin says that comedy is the perfect venue for that thinking — but maybe not conversing — to occur:

The comedic moment liberates people to laugh out loud at what they really feel and what they really think, but they’re going to naturally suppress those thoughts and views once they’re outside that particular arena,” he said. “It’s OK to sit in that arena and just crack up laughing about rednecks, making jokes about Obama’s ears or his race or whatever, but the moment you want to have the conversation, the whole dynamic changes.

The best joke in the article? That would be when we hear a bit from W. Kamau Bell’s recent stand-up show:

I’m voting for Barack Obama. Not for the reason you expect. I did it because he’s black. Not because he’s intelligent, or well spoken or represents hope. Nope. You had me at Negro.

From another perspective, Dahleen Glanton of the Chicago Tribune does a great job breaking down “coded prejudice” — when people use a secret language of sorts to identify and frequently stereotype African Americans and other minorities.

It uses the present presidential campaign as a starting point the discuss the power and influence of this coding — reminding us about everything from “welfare queens” to Willie Horton and noting how Obama has already had to fight this subtle racism:

“We hear code words all the time in talk radio. It’s a constant drumbeat,” said [Steve] Rendall, who also co-hosts FAIR’s national radio show, “CounterSpin.” “Code word bigotry is a secret code, a secret handshake between the listening audience and the host.

“Either conscious or unconscious, there is sometimes a mispronunciation of [Obama's] name or dwelling on his middle name [Hussein], suggesting that he is some covert Muslim. It is not overt racism but it is xenophobic.”

But it’s an admirably broad piece, tracing the recent history of lawsuits based on coding, which is still being legally defined.

I posted last week about on the power of rumors in this year’s presidential campaign — about how this old-fashioned tactic has taken on new meaning in the digital age. Two subsequent articles have done a great job of explaining the reasons why and how rumors work.

In a New York Times op-ed, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, experts on how the brain processes memory, discuss how a false rumor — such as that Barack Obama, a Christian, is a Muslim — is very hard to get out of your mind, even after you have been presented with and recognize the truth. Scary stuff:

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

It’s a mind-opening read.

And from another angle, Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post discusses the latest work on political rumors by Danielle Allen at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (yeah, it’s the free-wheeling genius think tank that was once the research home of Albert Einstein). Allen, an expert in the “the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn,” became obsessed with how the rumor of Obama being a Muslim — specifically, the chain e-mail about it that became viral — began and spread.

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Greg Braxton writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times:

There’s a somewhat surprising consensus that admirable black fictional figures may have subtly conditioned the electorate to be receptive to a candidate like Obama, the presumptive Democratic standard-bearer.

“One wonders to what degree a scenario played out in a safe, contained, fictionalized context might have prepared people for the real thing,” said Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. “Popular culture is more than mere entertainment. It gives us a dress rehearsal for the real thing. We can imagine who we are and who we would like to be.”

Make-believe black presidents occupy an odd little corner of pop culture, a territory that a few notable films and television programs have staked out.

The piece makes some unsubstantiated psychological leaps, but it is worth it simply for the history it provides of black presidents on the big and small screen. It sent me on a search, for example, to find more info about a short film, “Rufus Jones for President” (1933), starring a very young Sammy Davis Jr. as a black 7-year-old elected president (see it here) and about a a full-length film “The Man” (1972), starring James Earl Jones “that is largely credited with being the first serious treatment of a black man becoming president”:

Based on an Irving Wallace novel, the movie starred James Earl Jones as the Senate president pro tem who suddenly ascends to the Oval Office after the untimely deaths of the president and speaker of the House and the illness of the vice president.

In the poster for the film, Jones is pictured taking the oath of office at a ceremony populated by white politicians. The tag line for the movie reads “The first black president of the United States. First they swore him in. Then they swore to get him.”

Braxton interviews at length the minds behind two more recent representations of black presidents: the satirical film “Head of State,” in which Chris Rock plays May Gilliam, an ordinary man who ascends to the presidency, and the television series “24,” which began, maybe more radically, in the middle of the presidency of David Palmer (portrayed by Dennis Haysbert)., in which the qualifications of David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) for the highest office were never questioned.

Worthwhile photo galleries accompany the article.

The only issue I have with the article — and this is true for much coverage of pop culture in the mainstream media — is it focuses too heavily on how “life imitates art,” how pop culture is a progressive, forward-thinking force.

While I wouldn’t deny the power of pop culture to change minds, I think it is equally important that we put pop culture in its own historical context — and see it reflecting the anxieties and prejudices of its day, even as it imagines such a “progressive” scenario as a black presidency.

With the exception of David Palmer on “24″ — where a black presidency was accepted as matter-of-fact — all the other representations that Braxton notes can be seen as actually regressive.

It’s telling that on the DVD commentary to “Head of State” Chris Rock says, “I don’t know if I’ll see a black president in my lifetime.” While Braxton sees this as a laughable “misunderstanding,” he ignores that fact that the intention of the Rock’s film was not to lay the groundwork for a future black presidency — it was to express how much racism is an almost impenetrable obstacle to black leadership.