New Gold City

Malcolm Little, around 8 The second set of observations while reading, in parallel, both The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Dreams from My Father . Preliminary research for my next novel.  Honestly, in reading the autobiographies of two of America's most defining cultural figures, you find a lot of similarities in their early lives. It's kind of stunning. However, one of the significant differences between how Barack Obama and Malcolm X grew up is that from a young age Malcolm's parents made him highly aware of his special skin tone, while little Barry's family seems to have actively sought to minimize any concern about pigmentation when he was young. Obama, in fact, had to figure things out on his own -- leastways, as he tells the story. Both situations are logical as far as they are described by these two. Early in his autobiography, Malcolm X notes that his parents seemed to treat him in opposite ways because his complexion was so much lighter than his siblings'...

In a commentary piece for The Philadelphia Inquirer last week (Friday, November 6), columnist George Curry uses USA Today/Gallup poll data to paint a bleak picture of America's sense of "race relations." Noting that when Barack Obama was elected president at this time last year, as many as 70% of Americans were "convinced that race relations would improve..." a year later, writes Curry, only about 56% of the country feels hopeful -- the proportion of Americans who felt this way in 1963. Curry then goes on to examine American opinion about race with respect to the Gates-Crowley "teachable moment" we witnessed this summer. He reports that 30% of African Americans blamed Sgt. Crowley for the incident and only 4% blamed Professor Gates, while 32% of whites blamed Gates and 7% blamed Crowley. Leaving aside the fact that well over half the country still has hope that racial issues can settle down, and that more than two-thirds of the African and European ci...