good stuff. seems like an honest personal appraisal of the situation.

what shall we fight about?

yeah ... really good article ..

oh my...is that a cat or a frog?

i wonder if reed kroloff has noticed...now every time he walks into a convenience store the clerks watch him like a hawk....he can't quite seem to respond to ads for apartments fast enough, they're always rented...people are starting to assume he's good at basketball...and now harvard is dying to have him on the faculty

i showed this article to my wife, and we tried to figure out how this got through the editors at metropolis. i'd like to see reed kroloff tell cornel west that he is now black. it's certainly a literary device intended to be provocative and controversial, and it certainly worked, at least with two libertarian-conservatives like my wife and myself, but i think most african-americans who have grown up in the US would agree that you don't just put on the mantle of racial suffering and victimhood like a hairshirt that can be removed at will. because it can be removed. at will. the whole reason race is such a deep issue is because it DOES go as deep as your skin -- and it takes a LOT of work to change your apparent racial identity.

while growing up jewish and gay in waco TX surely must be no picnic -- it pales in comparison to growing up black and poor in waco TX.

we talked it over and finally realized, hey, this is the kind of self-important, self-righteous, self-loathing editorial laxative that "enlightened" guilty upper-middle-class liberals lap up like warm milk. and the very cogent and well-articulated thoughts he elucidated later in the article were far outweighed by the sheer stupidity of the title and the first sentences. i can certainly see the irony and the humor and the sarcasm involved, but to me our society has lines you don't cross.

ochona

i admittedly only perused the article..but i'm thinking that you
misread what he is saying....or are reading it literally?

i think he is trying to say that for a while he understands how it feels to
be ignored, patronized or whatever that he believes black people
experience on a daily basis. i don't think he is literally trying
to claim being black with any sincerity.. just that he wonders how this
situation happened in the first place and such. i see it as empathy,
not his attempt to claim 200 years of racial suffering and victimhood.

i found your post to be well worded and interesting, but i question
if this sentence in particular "hey, this is the kind of self-important, self-righteous, self-loathing editorial laxative that "enlightened" guilty upper-middle-class liberals lap up like warm milk." isn't that almost as
self righteous, demeaning, completely oversimplifying, arrogant,
stereotyping, and pigeon-holing as you would like to avoid with
other issues (in this case race). why debase the rest of your post
with that?

I don't know why the author felt the need to equate his feelings with frustration with being 'black', especially since he doesnt even comment on how race may have played a part in how the how poorly the situation was handled in the first place. I think he would have a pretty hard time getting any black citizens of New Orleans to agree that his feelings of frustration qualify as the 'black' experience. If in the poor circumstances of his fellow black residents, we would have seen him sitting on the roof of his house waiting for the government to come rescue him. Was Mr. Kroloff without a car and trapped in the superdome? I think not.

"you dont know me, like i know me"
-greatest song lyric of all time.

Sickle cell is a bitch!

i actually read the entire article, and as i mentioned there were some great points inside. it's the first paragraph that i took issue with, and in a way that made me wonder what reed kroloff really cares about...does he care about solving these problems or being rhetorically bombastic and controversial?

i do take extreme umbrage at the tendency of people to substitute self-loathing and "advocacy" for real ground-level grass-roots WORK on an issue such as the reconstruction of new orleans. and i actually think that this article isn't mean to expiate any guilt on reed's part -- but more to pander to those for whom expiation replaces action. which is also why i was so flabbergasted and amazed. reed kroloff did great work at architecture magazine -- why this? surely he knows better. he IS actually trying to get something done...but why this?

i worry this sets us back, and when i mean "us" i mean every one of us of any race who deeply, desperately loves the city of new orleans. i have never lived there, have only visited, but i really do love it in a way i love almost no place else. it's as if reed had said, i too lost a loved one in 9/11...he didn't, we all know he didn't, and the words would just set the cause back.

he cared about being retorically bombastic and controversial. He could have made his point without trying to be so poetic and say Im black right now. he could have said im jewish and my house smells like mold, and the point would have been the same.
who's that guy above?

peel him, savour his pith and scatter his seeds:

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop


honestly, for a moslem, i sometimes feel jewish.
those beautiful boys, those beautiful jewish boys

but then again, in the uk there is a very famous black person who calls himself david beckham

any hot unruly black criminals? i'm in heat.

mandingo thing is funny quo

"You Don't Know Me"-Ray Charles

It was confessional, yet dishonest. Jane pretends to be horrified by the sexuality that she in fact fetishizes. She subsumes herself to the myth of black male potency, but then doesn't follow through. She thinks she 'respects Afro-Americans,' she thinks they're 'cool,' 'exotic,' what a notch he 'd make in her belt, but, of course, it all comes down to mandingo cliché, and he calls her on it. In classic racist tradition she demonizes, then runs for cover. But then, how could she behave otherwise? She's just a spoiled suburban white girl with a Benneton rainbow complex. It's just my opinion, and what do I know.

doll him up and make him go:

Mr. backlash, mr. backlash
Just who do think I am
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages
And send my son to vietnam

You give me second class houses
And second class schools
Do you think that alla colored folks
Are just second class fools


then....

Oh daddy love me good
Oh daddy now love me good
Oh daddy love me good
Oh daddy now love me good

If you want me to cook and sew
If you want me to cook and sew
If you want me to cook and sew yeah
Outside of you there is no place to go

Please don’t treat me so doggone mean
Please don’t treat me so doggone mean
Please don’t treat me so now doggone mean yeah
You’re the meanest man I ever see

actually m.j looks sweet with breasts.vunerable. without them he'd just look creepy.

Jesus white people are hopeless.

Im not racist ,I hate everyone equally