African Americans

As a child growing up in Houston, Isaiah Washington said, his first impressions of Africans were discomfiting TV images of "natives running around in raffia with bones in their noses . . . trying to put Tarzan in a pot." The 45-year-old African American actor, formerly of "Grey's Anatomy," said his mother never talked of Africa. School never taught him much about his ancestral continent and news stories, he said, projected a place of poverty and pestilence, corruption and war.

On June 8, a District Court judge will once again consider the future of the federal consent decree under which the Los Angeles Police Department has operated for the last eight years. The court will decide whether the decree -- which was designed to address a series of long-standing problems by imposing a detailed and ambitious program of reform -- should continue or whether it should be allowed to lapse.

After decades of exposure to all of those stereotypes -- the Aunt Jemimas and the gangsta rappers, the Willie Hortons and TV drug dealers -- this just wasn't supposed to be happening. The test results baffled Florida State University psychologist Ashby Plant. She checked and rechecked the figures. Something must be wrong, she told herself. Plant and her colleagues had just administered a racial Implicit Association Test to 74 white college students. A common tool in psychology lab work, the IAT purports to measure the kinds of biases people may not admit or even know they harbor.

"Have you seen what we've got now?" asks Don Newcombe, sitting proudly in the stands at Dodger Stadium on a Wednesday night that was bathed in symbolism and dedicated to his great friend: Jackie Robinson. "We've got some real numbers now. I wasn't even really aware of it until Frank McCourt told me the other day . . . we're making progress."

President Obama's conversation with Africa is unlike any dialogue in history between that continent and the U.S. government for one reason: It is being led by a black American president with African roots. And Obama, who often cites his father's homeland of Kenya, clearly sees his background as an advantage in pursuing new policies.

'God damn America," declared the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. in 2003. But if that got you worried that Wright was somehow not a true American, this week's events ought to set your mind at rest. With multiple televised performances, Wright has now definitively proved he shares that most quintessential of all American traits: a profound desire to hog the airwaves and proclaim, "It's all about me." Next stop: "American Idol"! Thanks a lot, Reverend.

Donald Fleckenstein lives comfortably in retirement, but higher food and energy costs still prompted him to trade down from a big American car to a small Honda, to cancel plans for a European vacation and to worry more about how the next generations of his family will fare. "I am not protected or immune to the economic situation in the world, regardless of how much money I make," said Fleckenstein, 81, of Westport, Conn.

Former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez is one of California's most gifted politicians; filmmaker Spike Lee is a remarkable American artist. This week, both of them made utter fools of themselves, and understanding exactly how they did so tells us something important about where we are as a people and as a country. There was a time, not long ago, when the worst hypocrisy in American public life was the pretense that race and ethnicity somehow didn't matter. But that's not the case any more.

The chattering classes on the post-racial right say Barack Obama's win is one more nail in the coffin of affirmative action. It proves blacks are equal, they say, and therefore they don't need "special considerations" anymore. Abigail Thernstrom wrote it in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. Maybe they're right, and gays' attack on blacks for voting to ban gay marriage is the proof. Since when have blacks been the target of left-wing opprobrium about the way they vote?

Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri, made a lame attempt to invalidate the idea that Barack Obama's victory is a symbol of American racial progress. It's not a surprise really. The United States' enemies long have used racial inequality as the stick with which to beat us. And unfortunately, it's a stick that we've handed them over and over again. Domestic discrimination has been at odds with our national mission of democratizing the world.