White People

Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone Ralph Richard Banks Dutton: 289 pps., $25.95

The Republican presidential primary campaign so far hasn't produced a nominee, but it has had one clear outcome -- worsening the GOP's image among the young, the better-educated and the non-white. That finding, from the Pew Research Center survey released Wednesday, could be a serious handicap for the party in elections this fall and in years to come, said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut. "The Republicans really are the party of white people, and especially older white people," Kohut told reporters as the poll was released.

"I have nothing against honkies," said Martin Mull matter-of-factly. "I'm a honky myself. I love white people." Then why does he treat his people so caustically in his new videocassette? "Martin Mull Presents the History of White People in America" is just out on MCA, priced at $24.95. "It's satire," said Mull, the co-star and co-writer--with Allen Rucker. "Whites should be able to take a joke. People poke fun at all the other ethnic and minority groups, so why not whites?"

Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone Ralph Richard Banks Dutton: 289 pps., $25.95

William Pope.L, the man behind the exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art titled "Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid. . . ," has never shied away from confrontation. He once tied himself to the door of a Manhattan bank with sausage links and, clad only in a skirt made of dollar bills, tried to give the money away to passersby. Over a five-year span, he crawled along sections of Broadway, from Staten Island to the Bronx, wearing a Superman suit.

Antonio Villaraigosa, who is under attack for hanging out with too many white people, was seen in a downtown Los Angeles restaurant Wednesday night with yet another paleface -- me. My father's parents are from Spain, so some people might count me as Hispanic. But I guess I look pretty white, and Villaraigosa is being called a traitor to his people for hanging out with too many Caucasians.

Two white people walk into a bar, a badly lit Culver City saloon called the Backstage whose interior design could be summed up as one pool table, a no-frills photo booth and some scattered neon. Blondie and the Rolling Stones belt out of the stereo, $3 Newcastle comes on tap and sticky laminated menus offer up garlic fries, chili cheese fries and buffalo wings. In other words, welcome to No. 148 of 150 things white people like: dive bars. "If you want to say I was planning that far ahead, that's great," said Christian Lander, resident white person behind the ridiculously popular blog Stuff White People Like, a snarky bit of grass-roots anthropology that recently transmuted into a rumored $300,000 book deal.

Probing the insidious origins of racism in everyday tensions and frustrations is only the launching pad for "White People," J.T. Rogers' far-reaching dissection of modern alienation and moral bankruptcy. In the Road Theatre Company's riveting production at the Lankershim Arts Center, complacent notions of a stable social order are shattered through overlapping and thematically interwoven monologues from a teacher, a housewife and a lawyer who, all too appropriately, never interact.

On a radio talk show shortly after the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, a caller half-jokingly urged whites to riot. The talk show host and subsequent callers concluded that, of course, white people don't riot. But in reality, if "to riot" means something like "to wreak havoc on others," then white Americans have been rioting for some time. But when white people riot, they do it silently, almost invisibly, albeit painfully. Who are these white people?

Allan Gurganus' first book, a novel titled "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All," was published last year to considerable critical acclaim. It became a bestseller, with 170,000 copies in print, and earned him--according to the publicity accompanying his new book--comparisons to Dickens, Rabelais, Joyce and Twain, among others.

There's not much love out there for upscale single black women who have been publicly lamenting their lack of marital options. And I'm not talking love as in romance. My Saturday column about successful black women stuck on single because of a shortage of comparable black men drew plenty of response from readers, but very little sympathy. The consensus — delivered through stinging stereotypes and blunt from-the-trenches advice — went something like this, from an e-mail by Alan, a "white middle-aged man" in Woodland Hills: "Any male, black or not, would be intimidated by the loud, raucous, foul-mouthed 'braying' of so many black women.

From 1790 to 1952, only "white people" were eligible to become naturalized U.S. citizens. That fact alone explains why for most of our history, immigrants and their descendants fought to be considered white. It wasn't a pretty process. Nor did the coveted category of "whiteness" have any clear definition. Oh, sure, some dimwitted people really thought it was a rigidly scientific category. But for the most part, the evolving definitions and elastic boundaries of whiteness were subject to cultural bias and, let's face it, whim and subjectivity.

Blood and Politics The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream Leonard Zeskind Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 622 pp., $35 -- This April, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the media world was briefly ablaze debating whether it was true.

The Book of Night Women A Novel Marlon James Riverhead: 418 pp., $26.95 -- "People say that Montpelier Estate was so huge that you could tell you're there as soon as the wind start blowing to the east," declares the narrator of Marlon James' second novel, "The Book of Night Women." The plantation of which James writes, on the east coast of Jamaica, is populated by thousands of slaves, some from Africa, some Jamaica-born, and some women whose bodies are the living chronicle of rape and power.

Keep quiet, please. Yes, you members of the chattering classes who can't stop dissecting Barack Obama's inauguration speech and finding it somehow wanting. It wasn't soaring enough for you! It was full of cliches! It invoked George Washington but didn't even mention Abraham Lincoln! Or Martin Luther King Jr.! It didn't talk about race! You hush up. You're talking so loudly you can't hear the echoes. Obama's speech was just right.

Two white people walk into a bar, a badly lit Culver City saloon called the Backstage whose interior design could be summed up as one pool table, a no-frills photo booth and some scattered neon. Blondie and the Rolling Stones belt out of the stereo, $3 Newcastle comes on tap and sticky laminated menus offer up garlic fries, chili cheese fries and buffalo wings. In other words, welcome to No. 148 of 150 things white people like: dive bars. "If you want to say I was planning that far ahead, that's great," said Christian Lander, resident white person behind the ridiculously popular blog Stuff White People Like, a snarky bit of grass-roots anthropology that recently transmuted into a rumored $300,000 book deal.

There is a thread that connects all black people's experiences: the burden of skin color. This fact was brought home to me twice in the past few days, and the fault lines in American race relations were twice exposed. A discussion on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission always evokes some of those deep currents that run through the American historical memory. But sometimes there is an attempt to redefine, harness or, worse still, to silence these deep-running currents.

Months before the Rodney King trial began, civil-rights activists contacted the Justice Department to ask its participation in prosecuting the policemen, as the federal civil-rights laws give them ample reason to do. Instead, the Bush Administration put the matter on the back burner. In back-burnering a civil-rights issue, the Bush Administration was merely following a Republican policy, now 25 years old, of being the national party of white America. It is a policy that has served the GOP well.

A week has passed, and I haven't heard back from Carolyn. Last Tuesday, I printed an e-mail I'd received from a reader named Carolyn, criticizing a column of mine from years ago. She'd come away from it believing that I considered most whites insensitive racists and that I felt blacks should always be on the lookout for something to be angry about. I don't feel that way; I couldn't have said that. And because Carolyn didn't remember "the particulars" of the column, I couldn't defend myself.