Postracial as the night is long in mid-June in Barrow, Alaska

Thirty years after Octavia Butler's Mind of My Mind, authors still have to fight to get their black heroines shown as such on the covers of their books.(*)

Also, three great posts on Henry Louis Gates getting arrested by a police officer who was committing criminal trespass in Gates's home:

• A somewhat rambling but good John McWhorter piece but with a pointer to a great editorial he wrote on the same subject in 2001;


• A good Pam Spaulding piece on Officer Crowley, interpolating a great guest post by Irene Monroe, a black woman living in Cambridge; and


• A guest post on the Reality-based Community by "Lowry Heussler, who has worked on police-misconduct cases in Massachusetts", on how, if you accept that Officer Crowley's account of how he acted is truthful, he should be fired immediately:
  

  He's staying put in Gates' home, having been asked to leave, and Gates is demanding his identification. What does Crowley do? He suggests that if Gates wants his name and badge number, he'll have to come outside to get it.

And, you know, because structural racism isn't the only kind, let's have some actual bone-through-the-nose active racism, courtesy of the upstanding pillars of society at Doctors for Patient Freedom (no link):

Conservative Activist Forwards Racist Pic Showing Obama As Witch Doctor

*Minor clarification: Larbalestier was not fighting to have a black girl on the cover of her book--her preferred cover design depicted no character. But given that one of the few things that could be said with certainty about the main character of the book is that she is black, Larbalestier did fight to keep the cover from showing a white girl. She lost the fight.

Pulling up the ladder

Here's a fact I hadn't known previously:

Catherine Rampbell at The New York Times... note that seniors—who are already beneficiaries of a government guarantee of health care—are disproportionately likely to oppose a government guarantee of health care.

(via)