... not only those of the "perpetual victim" race. Cornel West is a fraudulent circus clown, with not one single book of real scholarship under his belt. He preaches about the poverty of the ghettos, while charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for one lousy speech, with nothing to say but further appropriations of phony victimhood and whining about wrongs done to his great-great-great-grandparents. Even you, Cruse, despite being by far the most incoherent D.I. columnist, continue to be tolerated and published weekly.Calling people who gently remind you of these facts "racist" is childish and unproductive. Not to mention racist as well.

I learned for quite some time to take Cruse's opinions with a pound of salt. After all, what weight does Cruse's endorsement of Greedy West have, when Cruse is widely known to be the least professional of all D.I. columnists in history, except for George Ploss and possibly Mariam Sobh?

I still remember some hilarious comments posted on the old forum, in which "Mother Grammar" and others have pointed out the incredible amount of grammatical errors and malapropisms in every single column written by Paul Cruse. Of course, he would quickly claim that pointing out his lack of intellect is"offensive" and "racist". Sorry, Paul, I want to be PC and all, but the discrepancy between your ambitions and your abilities, if I may use that noun, stinks to high heavens. Instead of being grateful that you've gotten professional chances you don't deserve, BECAUSE of the PC times we live in, you continue to whine. What do you truly have to offer society? One little annoying repetitious tune: "I'm black, I'm a victim, keep offering me advantages so I have time to tell you all how racist you are".

To find out who "Dr." Cornel West (most certainly he would have never become a "doctor," if not for some top universities having to fill up racial "success" quotas with.... whatever) really is, study this:

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=813

UIUC still has to answer about the hundreds of thousands of dollars (DI didn't tell us yet how many) which were flushed down the deep pockets of the greedy Black KKK "doctor," with nothing but racist snake-oil to show for it.

... canceled.

You know Paul. Maybe to understand what MLK Jr. thought about race relations you would perhaps listen to HIS words instead of a professtocratic quack whose only clame to fame is that he was able to burn Larry Summers for having the audacity to suggest that West produce some real, honest scholarship rather than CDs of noise.

Thanks to you Paul, i think at long last, we can finally label the DI as a hate group. You have made our jobs much easier.

Oh and by the way Paul:

It isn't exactly exactly considerate to tell mothers of white students that their sons "are farm animals." Like your hero Houston Baker.

Its pretty dehumanizing to deny basic tenures of freedom like due process which your hero Mike Nifong did.

Actually a point in fact: In 19th century New Orleans, blacks could own property, get paid work, and in certain elections vote.

You may think colorblind is unhelpful, but it is better than what you are: just the regular type of blind.

So, let me understand this argument. Not acknowledging race means not acknowledging culture, which dehumanizes people.

The most obvious problem is that race is not perfectly correlated with culture. Are all whites (Poles, Greeks, Italians, etc.) assumed to have the same culture? Are all blacks?

Second, it is pretty clear that claiming that treating individuals as, well, individuals dehumanizes people is ridiculous. In the worst case, if one "acknowledges" culture by inferring it from race, the inference will be wrong. A person's personality and behavior will be interpreted in a false context. In the best case, the cultural inference will be correct, but it then leads to collectivist nonsense. This is what dehumanizes people. Treating all members of X (which inferred from race A) in a certain way, or expecting them to behave similarly is dehumanizing.

Yes, 19th century slave owners dehumanized blacks, but not because they were colorblind. Of course, you don't explicitly link this particular dehumanization to colorblindness, but what other inference is one to draw given the logic articulated in the article before this example is provided? Even Paul must have realized stating this (the logical extension of his argument) would have been absurd. In reality, the slave owners dehumanized by making broad generalizations based on race and perceived culture.

I'm not always a fan of Paul's but...he's more right than wrong on this one:

Paul writes: "[Activists] intention was to have a compassionate society. Not a society that ignored race, but rather expressed neighborly love in spite of race. "

What could possibly be wrong about that statement?

Sometimes we whites confuse whiteness with normalcy, and colorblindness can really be a way of saying, "Everybody can be in the club now, as long as they act white" or as Huck Finn said of the slave Jim, "I knowed' he was white on the inside."

Twain was enlightened for a 19th century man, but we ought to do better now.

Any white person who will bother to travel cross culturally or put themselves in the position of a minority (just go visit a "black" church some Sunday) will quickly recognize that race and culture often produce different ways of doing things.

Why be blind to this fact? Why not be compassionate enough to recognize differences? Actually, doing things Paul's way has freed me from PC talk, allowing me to say with no rancor or racism, there are some things I love about traditional black American culture and some things I don't. Because I don't ignore race, I am free to pick and choose.

Big deal. We're all the same and different at the same time. I think that's the compassionate stance Paul's talking about, and I'm with him on this one.

The problem with all of this is that you can prejudge people based on the color of their skin. All Black people do not act alike. All Asian people do not act alike and all Hispanic people do not act alike. To base your judgments on what someone looks like is not only not fair, its also is not very accurate.

Martin Luther king was not asking us to ignore the fact that people are different, he was asking us to not assume that people are different just because they look different. Don't be colorblind, have x-ray vision.