NPR's John Ridley righteously dissects a summer of Hollywood blockbusters where 89% of films in wide release had no minorities among the leading cast members:

We had ... the lovely Jennifer Hudson playing a 21st century Hattie McDaniel to the Sex and the City gals. Excuse me, Jennifer's the one with the Oscar. Shouldn't they be fetching Jennifer's coffee? ... Yes, there was Will Smith as a superhero. An alcoholic, abusive, foul-mouthed superhero ... [T]here was redemption at the end of Hancock, but the path was so coarse as to be unsuitable for my kids to watch. So, the only hero of color they saw this summer was The Incredible Hulk. Which, by the way, why does a movie with nary a minority in it have to end with the Hulk destroying Harlem?

Between this and the presidential debate schedule, it's beginning to look like the media--traditionally an instrument of social progress--is actually lagging behind the political world when it comes to diversity.  And that's not easy to do. (h/t: Angry Asian Man)

A few short months ago, the three most viable presidential candidates were a black man, a white woman, and a white man. Now there's a 50/50 chance that the United States is about to elect its first non-white president less than three months, and rumors are swirling that even the white Republican guy is seriously considering a female running mate.

So, taking all of this into account, what do you think the race and gender makeup of the four presidential debate moderators will be?

• One white man, one man of color, one white woman, and one woman of color?
• Three white men, and one woman of color? Or maybe...
• Three white men and one white woman?

No such luck. As RaceWire's Jonathan Adams observes, the four presidential debate moderators will be four white men--a step down from the presidential debates conducted 20 years ago, where Bernard Shaw moderated what would turn out to be the most famous of the Bush-Dukakis debates. What does it say about the media when the presidential debate moderators are less diverse than the presidential candidates themselves? And as Adams asks...

If these are the picks for the presidential debates, what do think the short list looks like for Tim Russert’s job on Meet the Press?

Indeed. And taking the whiteness and maleness of the media into account, the bizarre, idiotic, and divisive coverage of the Democratic presidential primary--"race versus gender," the pundits screamed--becomes much easier to explain.

(Posted by Tom Head, About.com: Civil Liberties)

by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil LibertiesThis Flickr photo brings to mind a good analogy for racism: grocery store eggs.

Originally, the vast majority of grocery eggs were brown. But over time, chickens were bred to produce lighter and lighter eggs until eventually, they produced the white eggs that most people purchase today. The theory behind this was that white eggs looked cleaner.

While all this has happened, another change has taken place in the egg industry: mass production. Most eggs are now laid by battery hens who spend very short nine-month lives in cages too small for them to turn around in. They eat and defecate in the same place. They don't eat the sort of free range minerals that chickens ordinarily eat. Their immune systems are shot.

Most of the eggs sold today are actually much dirtier than the brown eggs that people used to eat, and created in circumstances that reflect greater cruelty. But most of them are also white, reflecting a longstanding preference for "clean"-looking eggshells.

Racism is a lot like that. There was a time when race probably mattered less than it does now. Early Egyptian art portrays differences between races but no clear hierarchy, and the association between dark-skinned people and slave labor was not clearly made until the trans-Saharan slave trade began in the 7th century AD.

But beginning at or near that point, our class system was color-coded to race. Over the centuries, hundreds of millions of sub-Saharan African emigrants who in many instances would have made great physicians, scientists, and policymakers were denied education and forced into lives of slave labor, while hundreds of millions of whites who in many instances would have been happier with manual labor were educated and groomed into roles that they didn't want and couldn't adequately fill. People were denied choices, denied flexibility, denied social mobility--setting the human race back as a result.

We have ended up with white eggs, mass-produced and genetically engineered to look "clean," that are actually far dirtier than the farm-produced brown eggs that preceded them. And we have ended up with white people, traditionally classified at the top of the Western caste hierarchy, dominating a world that many among them are underqualified to lead.

As long as the racist caste hierarchy defines our culture, we are in effect judging the cleanliness of our eggs by the color of their shells--with results that can be far deadlier than salmonella.

Related: Institutional Racism

by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties

Some people are just beyond reproach when it comes to racially inflammatory statements, remarks, or actions. Or, at least, they think they should be.

A.J. Plaid sees last week's controversial New Yorker cover as a good example of what Carmen Van Kerckhove calls "hipster racism," defined as:

... ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning "ironic" nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the behavior necessarily has to be meant to denigrate another person's race or ethnicity, but there are definitely solid examples of hipster racism out there.

One example that immediately comes to mind would be the illustrations selected for Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There, published by Seal Press, which used as its motif racist sketches from vintage comic books of white men and women doing battle with caricatures of black African tribesmen. Marcotte, who did not select the illustrations, offered a sincere apology; Seal Press, which did select the illustrations, offered an apology of the I'm-sorry-you-were-offended variety. The apology and stated rationale behind the illustrations seem very, well, hipster:

We apologize for any pain or concern these images have caused ...

We do not believe it is appropriate for a book about feminism, albeit a book of humor, to have any images or illustrations that are offensive to anyone.

Please know that neither the cover, nor the interior images, were meant to make any serious statement. We were hoping for a campy, retro package to complement the author's humor. That is all. We were not thinking ...

This 1950s Marvel comic is not an accurate reflection of our beauty standards, our beliefs regarding one's right to bear arms, nor our perspectives on race relations, foreign policy, or environmental policy.

Seal Press had, a few weeks prior, answered criticisms from bloggers of color by explaining that "you all engage best through negative discourse." But these Seal Press editors are people who do good activism on civil rights issues, whose views on race seem to be very 21st-century in other respects. What's the deal? Good question. No clear answers, though.

Likewise, as a former active member of Integrity--a group dedicated to working or the full inclusion of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender persons in the Episcopal Church--I was horrified when the president of the organization included an illustration depicting apes in episcopal vestments as part of a blog entry criticizing African archbishops. The only people who criticized the illustration seemed to be conservatives, who had their own reasons to do so.

And I have noticed a remarkable silence regarding a recent Rolling Stone illustration depicting McCain being tortured by jarring anti-Asian caricatures of Obama, Clinton, and Bush.

There seems to be a popularly held view that if you have non-white friends, come from a certain income class, and have the right political opinions, it just isn't necessary to worry about doing racist things. But the truth is that racist behavior isn't limited to stereotypically "racist" people; "good" people can make the same mistakes, and need to own up to it when they do.

I have no real opinion on the New Yorker cover. I think functionally the racist imagery can only be seen as satirical, but I also think that an illustration that relies on racist imagery, even when used in a satirical context, is not a brilliant thing to put on the cover of a major national magazine.

What do you think? Share your thoughts below.