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A land-claim suit is pitting Oneidas against other upstate residents.

DNA testing can convict the guilty; it can also destroy the privacy of millions.

In New Mexico, communists who fail to register their party affiliation with the state commit a felony. Under New Mexico's DNA databanking law, if they are caught they are required to submit a DNA sample to the department of public safety. In Idaho, consensual sodomy with a partner other than your spouse constitutes a sex-crime felony. Those unfortunate enough to be caught in the act are similarly required by law to submit a tissue sample to the state's DNA databank for the purposes of preventing future sex crimes. And if Governor George Pataki is successful in the next legislative session, New York will begin collecting genetic material from any person convicted of a misdemeanor, such as resisting arrest or disorderly conduct as a result of peaceful civil disobedience.

In an age of biotechnology and computers, we are all but a needle-stick away from disclosing hereditary-disease susceptibilities, familial relationships and identifying information. Anyone who values privacy should therefore be concerned that US law-enforcement agencies are amassing ever larger portions of the general population's DNA while neglecting to implement measures that would protect the privacy and presumptive innocence of citizens. And because DNA evidence is currently enjoying an unprecedented degree of bipartisan enthusiasm, these gradual developments have tended to be sheltered from the criticism that might otherwise confront such policies.

Not that DNA evidence's celebrity isn't well deserved. It is many rape victims' best hope for identifying their assailants and law enforcement's most penetrating method of apprehending serial offenders. It can be credited with triggering a re-examination of the nation's capital punishment system by exonerating eight death-row inmates. Like its predecessor, the fingerprint, DNA profiles are a reliable means of identifying individuals (except in the case of identical twins). But glib analogies to fingerprints obscure important differences. DNA samples can reveal far more information than fingerprints, including sensitive medical conditions, traits or a person's biological parentage. In addition, while fingerprints are unique to every individual, genetic profiles are partially shared among blood relatives. Thus, databanks contain identifying information on nonoffending relatives of people explicitly covered by databanking statutes. Finally, because we shed our genetic calling cards in a trail of hair follicles, skin flecks, saliva aerosols and finger smudges, DNA can also provide a trace of our activities.

DNA databanks are premised on statistics indicating that individuals convicted of a serious violent offense often commit other violent offenses that leave behind incriminating DNA. Tissue samples, usually in the form of a blood sample or cheek swab, are thus collected from offenders covered by their state's databank laws and are analyzed using a technique called "profiling," which detects genetic variations among individuals that, at least as currently understood by geneticists, have no biological function. The resulting data are then computerized so that profiles produced from crime-scene samples can be compared with those already in the database, allowing authorities to eliminate certain suspects or target those whose profiles match. In effect, databanks provide a means of genetically frisking anyone who has ever committed a covered offense for any crime in which DNA has been recovered.

As of June 1998 all fifty states had enacted statutes authorizing state and local law-enforcement agencies to operate criminal DNA databases and to pool their DNA profiles into a national FBI-operated database called CODIS (Combined DNA Identification System). Though the earliest laws targeted convicted violent sexual felons, civil libertarians looked to the history of Social Security numbers, fingerprinting and drug-testing to warn of an inevitable migration of the technique from convict to suspect terrain. A decade later, as many states have passed laws to cover new offender categories, the Cassandras appear to have been vindicated. Delaware, for instance, requires submission of genetic samples for all those who have committed offenses against children, which include selling tobacco or tattooing minors without the consent of a guardian. Twenty-three states cover certain categories of misdemeanors, and seven states have enacted legislation that would require DNA submission for any felony, which extends DNA databanking into realms such as perjury, larceny, bribery and fraud. Thus, in addition to New Mexico's statute covering unregistered communists, Alabama's code covers tax evaders and Virginia's targets people who deface brands or marks on timber. Experts like CODIS program director Steve Niezgoda have predicted that all states will eventually amend their statutes to cover all felonies; four states have already done so, and another three have recently considered or will consider such an expansion in their next legislative sessions. Among these three, New York's proposal stands out as by far the nation's most comprehensive, targeting all convicted felons and class-A misdemeanants.

DNA databanking laws are furthermore part of the ferment that is corroding the century-old juvenile justice system that treats minors as a category of offenders separate from adults. More than half of all states authorize inclusion of DNA profiles collected from juveniles in their databanks. In contrast to the convention of sealing or erasing juvenile criminal records after a period of time--a practice grounded on a rehabilitative ideal--none of the statutes require states to remove juvenile DNA profiles from their databanks, and one (Arizona's) expressly prohibits their removal. Several states have revised their original legislation to cover juvenile offenders as well. The spread of DNA databanking to minors is especially troubling when considered against the racial inequities that plague the juvenile justice system. According to Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, "When you control for poverty, white and black [teens] commit the same amount of violent crime, [but] blacks are arrested at four times the rate of whites and imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites. So don't think for a second this databank will be race-neutral. This policy will grossly overrepresent criminal behavior by blacks and exacerbate disparities in incarceration because [databanks are] going to be used against people."

An indirect consequence of expanding DNA databanks is their partial coverage of a larger proportion of nonoffending relatives as well. Because individuals share portions of their DNA with biological relatives--half in the case of siblings, parents and children--an incomplete match between a databanked person's profile and that of a crime-scene sample might lead investigators to question an individual's immediate family. The effect of such profiling by proxy is that identifying information about nonoffenders is present in criminal databank systems as well; in effect, if you have a relative whose profile has been databanked, you're likely to be partially genetically frisked as well.

A critical unresolved question about current databanking practices concerns what law-enforcement agencies actually do with their frozen vials of human tissue. The human genome contains approximately 100,000 different genes, many of which are associated with specific illnesses. Though DNA profiles have few applications beyond linking individuals to biological specimens, the actual tissue samples submitted by offenders could in principle be analyzed for genetic traits ranging from sickle-cell anemia to schizophrenia. Since evolving typing techniques may one day outmode profiles currently being entered into computers, more than half of US states are authorized or required by law to archive their samples so they can be retested. This sustains the possibility that samples may eventually be used for purposes other than profiling.

Most statutes restrict sample use to "law enforcement"--a term whose broadness in this context can only be described as oceanic. Twenty states allow law-enforcement agencies to use samples for research on improving forensic techniques, which could mean searching banked DNA samples for genetic predictors of recidivism, pedophilia or aggression. One Massachusetts legislator publicly advocated such a use, and Tom Callaghan, program manager of the FBI's Federal Convicted Offender DNA Database, refused to rule out such a possibility when pressed at a National Institute of Justice Symposium in September 1999. Moreover, tissue repositories created by databanks would provide genetics researchers with congenial waters in which to trawl for genes thought to be involved in criminal behavior. Alabama's databanking law brushes perilously close to this by authorizing release of anonymous DNA population data collected by law-enforcement authorities to "assist in other humanitarian endeavors including, but not limited to, educational research or medical research or development."

Experimenting with offender DNA in this way would violate basic tenets of biomedical ethics by using tissues that were not obtained by consent for purposes that arguably run counter to the interests of the research subject. "If [law-enforcement authorities] want to do research," argues Boston University bioethicist George Annas, "they should follow the same rules everyone else has to follow in terms of informed consent and privacy.... Criminals have privacy rights like everyone else." As such, using databanked samples for research without consent also runs counter to recommendations by the American College of Medical Genetics.

Such research authorizations are especially troubling in light of this nation's checkered history of experimentation on prisoners. In 1875 social reformer and prison inspector Richard Dugdale wrote his famous study of the Jukes family after he noticed a disproportionate number of inmates with that last name. The availability of banked criminals' tissues may prove a valuable resource should society's interest in genetic explanations for social ills be renewed.

Legal challenges of DNA database laws have generally failed and are therefore unlikely to stem their widening sweep. Practices in Britain, the first country to enlist DNA in its crime-fighting cavalry, may portend dramatically widened use of databanking in the United States. Britain's Forensic Science Service is authorized to collect DNA samples from anyone questioned about or suspected of any offense for which a person could be detained. As of July 1999, England had collected 547,000 DNA samples; the effort was projected to reach 30 percent of British men eventually. In addition, England has conducted at least eighty "intelligence-based screens"--the official term for what is colloquially called a "genetic sweep"--in which the general population is asked to submit DNA samples to help police investigate a particular crime. Although samples are provided voluntarily, social pressures, heavy media coverage and the concern that failure to submit a sample may itself invoke police suspicion undermine the notion of submissions being truly consensual. Other countries, including Canada and Germany, have conducted similar sweeps, and while some argue that the Fourth Amendment would probably bar such practices in the United States, privacy watchdogs like New York Civil Liberties Union's executive director Norman Siegel caution that "Fourth Amendment challenges [of databanks] have not been successful; these are the only reference points we have [for predicting how courts will rule on genetic sweeps], and they're not promising."

The next battle between civil libertarians and law-enforcement authorities concerning DNA databanking is likely to concern the leap from profiling convicted felons to arrestees. Former NYPD chief Howard Safir has championed arrestee profiling, and US Attorney General Janet Reno has begun to explore the implications of such a policy by querying a National Institute of Justice commission. Arrestee profiling would dramatically broaden the reach of DNA databanking and, if not subject to careful restrictions, would empower law-enforcement authorities to arrest people for minor offenses, collect a tissue sample and search their databases for a match between the arrestee's profile and another crime-scene sample. Despite widespread enthusiasm in law-enforcement circles, profiling on such a scale isn't likely to be implemented anytime soon, given the backlog of tissue samples awaiting profile analysis and the high costs (at least $100 per sample). Nevertheless, one state (Louisiana) profiles arrestees for sexual offenses, and advancing automation technologies are likely to erode these fiscal barriers.

Though this is reason for despair among privacy advocates, there are a few hopeful signs among the various statutes. Twenty-seven states (and the federal government), for example, prohibit disclosure of genetic materials or information to unauthorized third parties. Wisconsin requires that law-enforcement authorities eliminate DNA samples of convicted persons after profiling is complete, and six states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming) restrict what authorities can do with collected DNA by prohibiting analysis of genetic mutations that could predict a person's traits. But in an environment where the political leaders most likely to raise objections to such policies are often silenced by a fear of appearing to be soft on crime, the stability of these protections remains to be seen.

Imagining a fair and protective system for using DNA evidence in the criminal justice system isn't all that difficult. People claiming innocence should be given opportunities to volunteer DNA to clear their name. For them--and more broadly for the credibility of the criminal justice system--DNA forensic technology may be the only life vest within reach. Upon overturning a conviction, volunteered DNA samples and profiles should be promptly destroyed, preserving the individual's presumptive innocence. For people convicted of serious violent offenses and beyond the reach of such exculpatory evidence, however, the trade-off between privacy and public interest may tilt toward favoring a DNA databanking system with strong privacy protections, including sample destruction after profiling and prohibitions on uses other than comparing profiles with those collected from crime scenes. And finally, to protect the presumptive innocence of convicted offenders' family members, states should impose stringent requirements for when a match between a crime-scene sample and a databanked profile can trigger an investigation.

Privacy is a zero-sum entity: The extension of law-enforcement authorities' genetic gaze comes directly at the expense of an individual's power to withhold such information. Where most human DNA handling once occurred in medical clinics and research laboratories--institutions that are generally subject to public oversight and cautious (if imperfect) ethical review--DNA has now entered a territory not particularly distinguished for its ethical circumspection. States are not providing many reasons for the public to be confident that they are taking these concerns seriously; perhaps of even greater concern, negligence in protecting the privacy of offenders and criminal suspects may acclimate a public to weak protections of genetic materials. As the predictive powers of genetic technologies are refined, this could have grievous consequences for everyone.























What ought to be read--and why--are questions that have a unique urgency in a multicultural milieu, where each group fights, legitimately, for its own space and voice. In the past couple of decades, battles over the Western canon have been fought strenuously in intellectual circles--one such flash point was Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and the debates that ensued. These skirmishes have much to do with the fact that America is undergoing radical change. The Eurocentric place once acknowledged as the heart of its culture has ceased to be so. Alternative groups, from different geographies, have brought with them the conviction that public life with a myriad of cores rather than a single one is far more feasible today.

It strikes me as emblematic that the voices most sonorous in the battlefield over the fate of literature are often Jewish, from those of the two Blooms, Allan and Harold, to that of Cynthia Ozick. This is not a coincidence: After all, the Jews are known as "the people of the book." For the Talmudic rabbis, to read is to pray, but so it is, metaphorically, among secular Jews...or, if not to pray, at least to map out God's cosmic tapestry. Among the most deeply felt Jewish expressions of book-loving I know is a letter to the legendary translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, a Spanish Jew of the illustrious translation school of Toledo in the twelfth century, written by his father. In it the elder Tibbon recommends:

Make your books your companions, let your cases and shelves be your pleasure grounds and gardens. Bask in their paradise, gather their fruit, pluck their roses, take their spices and their myrrh. If your soul be satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from prospect to prospect. Then will your desire renew itself and your soul be filled with delight.

But to turn Tolstoy's Anna Karenina into a companion, to satiate one's soul with it--ought that to be a Jewish pastime? I'm invariably puzzled at the lack of debate among Jewish intellectuals, especially in the Diaspora, on the formation of a multinational literary canon made solely of Jewish books. Why spend so many sleepless nights mingling in global affairs, reorganizing a shelf that starts in Homer and ends in García Márquez, yet pay no attention whatever to those volumes made by and for Jews?

The idea of a Jewish literary canon isn't new. Among others, Hayyim Nakhman Bialik, the poet of the Hebrew renaissance and a proto-Zionist, pondered it in the early part of the twentieth century. He developed the concept of kinus, the "ingathering" of a literature that was dispersed over centuries of Jewish life. Bialik's mission was to centralize it in a particular place, Israel, and in a single tongue, Hebrew. And a handful of Yiddish and Jewish-American critics, from Shmuel Niger to Irving Howe, have addressed it, although somewhat obliquely. Howe, for instance, in pieces like "Toward an Open Culture" and "The Value of the Canon," discussed the tension in a democratic culture between tradition and innovation, between the blind supporters of the classics and the anti-elitist ideologues. But in spite of editing memorable volumes like A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, he refused to see Jewish literature whole.

The undertaking never achieved the momentum it deserves--until now. A number of books have appeared in English in the past few months that suggest the need for a debate around a modern Jewish library. The Translingual Imagination (Nebraska), by Steven Kellman, a professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio, while partially concerned with Jewish literature, addresses one crucial issue: the polyglotism of authors like Sh. Y. Abramovitch, the so-called grandfather of Yiddish letters, whose conscious switch from Hebrew into Yiddish didn't preclude him from translating many of his novels, like The Mare, back into the sacred tongue. The presence of multilingualism in the Jewish canon, of course, is unavoidable, for what distinguishes the tradition is precisely its evaporative nature, for example, the fact that it emerges wherever Jews are to be found, regardless of tongue or geographical location. This complicates any attempt at defining it in concrete ways: What, after all, are the links between, say, Bruno Schulz, the Polish fabulist and illustrator responsible for The Street of Crocodiles, and Albert Cohen, the French-language author of the masterpiece Belle du Seigneur?

Also recently released is a book by Robert Alter, author of the influential The Art of Biblical Narrative and translator of Genesis. It is titled Canon and Creativity (Yale) and attempts to link modern letters to the biblical canon to stress issues of authority. Alter is attracted to the debate of "canonicity" as it is played out in academia and intellectual circles today, but he isn't concerned, not here at least, with purveying the discernible edges of Jewish literature historically. Far more concerned--obsessed, perhaps--with the continuity between Jewish authors from the Emancipation to the present is Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish at Harvard, whose volume The Modern Jewish Canon will legitimize the debate by bringing it to unforeseen heights. For purposes of mitigated objectivity, I must acknowledge up front that together with Alter and Wisse and four other international Jewish critics, I am part of a monthslong project at the Yiddish Book Center to compose a list of the hundred most "important" (the word cannot fail to tickle me) Jewish literary books since the Enlightenment. So I too have a personal stake in the game. But sitting together with other candid readers in a room is one thing. It is another altogether to respond to the pages--at once incisive and polemical--of one of them whose views have helped to form my own.

Wisse is a conservative commentator of the Jewish-American and Israeli scenes and, most significant to me, an intelligent reader of strong opinions whose work, especially her study of Itzjak Leib Peretz and her monograph The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, I have long enjoyed. In her latest work she ventures into a different territory: From specialist to generalist, she fashions herself as a Virgil of sorts, thanks to whom we are able to navigate the chaotic waters of Jewish culture.

Probably the most estimable quality of The Modern Jewish Canon is simply that it exists at all. It insinuates connections to document the fact that Jews have produced a literature that transcends national borders. Albert Memmi's Pillar of Salt and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock might appear to be worlds apart, but Wisse suggests that there is an invisible thread that unites them, a singular sensibility--a proclamation of Jewishness that is clear even when it isn't patently obvious.

This is a crucial assertion, given that Jewish communities worldwide often seem imprisoned in their insularity: Language and context serve to isolate them from their counterparts in other countries and continents. For example, American Jews, for the most part, are miserably monolingual. (I doubt Jews have been so limited linguistically at any time in the past.) They insist on approaching their own history as starting in the biblical period but then jump haphazardly to the Holocaust, and thereon to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. The Spanish period, so exhilarating in its poetic invocations, is all but ignored, and so is the importance of Jewish communities beyond those of Eastern Europe. Why are the echoes from the Tibbon family to Shmuel Hanagid, Shlomo ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra and medieval Spanish letters in general so faint? The power of these poets, the fashion in which they intertwined the divine and the earthly, politics and the individual, the struggles of the body and the soul, left a deep imprint in Jewish liturgy and shaped a significant portion of the Jewish people through the vicissitudes of the Ottoman Empire and northern Africa. Even the Dreyfus Affair is little known or regarded, as is the plight of the Jews in Argentina from 1910 to the bombing of their main cultural building in Buenos Aires in early 1994. And where the verbal isolation is not a problem, the insular perspective still applies: For instance, only now is Israel overcoming its negation of Diaspora life, which has deformed Israeli society and resulted in an institutionalized racism against those co-religionists whose roots are not traced to Yiddishland.

Wisse displays genuine esteem for high-quality literary art. She trusts her instincts as a savvy reader and writes about what she likes; no affirmative action criteria seem to apply in her choices--and for hewing to her own perspective, she ought to be commended. The common traits she invariably ascribes to what is a varied corpus of Jewish literature always point to Russia and Europe. Her encyclopedism is commendable in that it surveys a vast intellectual landscape, but it has clear limitations. She is well versed in English, Hebrew and Yiddish letters. But what about Sephardic culture? Ought she to exclude all that she is unfamiliar with?

The study is divided into ten chapters of around thirty pages each, ordered chronologically according to the birth dates of authors. She starts in the right place--with Sholem Aleichem, the author of the most beloved of all Jewish novels and my personal favorite, Tevye the Dairyman. And she ends with Israeli literature. In the interim, she mixes excerpts, critical commentary and historical perspective in exploring the work of Kafka, S.Y. Agnon, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer and scores of other luminaries, some of questionable value in my eyes (Jerzy Kosinski, for instance) and others often overpraised (here I would include Ozick). The contributions of critics such as Dan Miron, Chone Shmeruk, Lionel Trilling and Howe are acknowledged by Wisse in these pages, their perspectives still fresh and inviting.

It may be ungenerous to accuse Wisse of a certain nearsightedness; after all, to capture the essence of a literature written in a plethora of tongues and cultures, a literature that is by definition "undefinable," any potential cataloguer would need to be versed in each and every one of them. But The Modern Jewish Canon suffers another serious shortcoming, entirely within control: It is too dry a read. For a treatise that aspires to connect the various Jewish Weltanschauungen and juxtapose a rainbow of imaginations, each responding to different stimuli, from the eighteenth century to this day, Wisse offers little by way of narrative enchantment. She is a scholar and writes as such. Scarce effort is made to turn words into metaphors, to twist and turn ideas and allow them to wander into unexplored regions. The reader finds himself lost in a sea of "objective impersonality." Too bad, for shouldn't a book about the beauties of a polyphonic literature aspire to that on its own?

Wisse herself announces: "Modern Jewish literature...promises no happy merger into universalism at the end of the day." And yet some form of universalism is what she is attempting to describe, extending connective tissue between literary works where, at least superficially, there seemed none before. In that sense the achievement is impressive. Immediately after finishing the book, I took up pencil and paper to shape a list of what would be my own choice of books. In one of her last pages Wisse, who concentrates on novelists, includes a list of almost fifty titles, "meant to serve as a reference guide." Included are Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous, Piotr Rawicz's Blood From the Sky, Pinhas Kahanovitch's The Family Mashber, and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. But I found myself asking, Where are Marcel Proust, Elias Canetti and Moacyr Scliar? And that, precisely, is one thing a book of this sort should do: force readers to compose a response to the invisible questionnaire the author has quietly set before our eyes.

Future generations will find The Modern Jewish Canon proto-Ashkenazic and hyper-American, a sort of correlative to the Eurocentrism that once dominated American letters. They will kvetch, wondering why the Iberian and Levantine influence on today's Jewish books--from the poetry of the crypto-Jew João Pinto Delgado, to the inquisitorial autobiography of Luis de Carvajal the Younger, to even the Sephardic poetry that came out of the Holocaust--was so minimized in the English-language realm. Kvetch is of course a Yiddish word--or, as Leo Rosten would have it, a "Yinglish" one--but fretting and quarreling are Jewish characteristics regardless of place, and they inhabit the restless act of reading as well. The idea of a Jewish canon, modern and also of antiquity, hides behind it an invaluable fact: that Jews are at once outsiders and insiders, keepers of the universal library but also of their own private ones. Books have always served as their--our--companions for renewal and delight. The content of that private library might be up for grabs, but not its endurance.

The attempt to see Jewish literature whole, as expressing a singular sensibility, has never had the momentum it deserves--until now.

The Journal of Nutrition wrote about
Some researchers who tested chocolate out.
It may help stave off heart attacks, they claim.
Red wine, we've known for years, can do the same.
Without the need of any doctor's urging,
I feel a healthy diet plan emerging.

Afew days before the election, I accompanied a friend to the dentist's office. It was one of those situations in which appearance takes over more complex realities of who we are. I was a middle-aged black woman assisting an elderly white man. That he's a wild old radical who browbeats the mad law professor in me with Russian ideologues and German philosophers probably wasn't what most people saw as we toddled down the street arm in arm on cane. In the vast warren of the medical center, we become even more invisible in a waiting room filled with physically fragile patients, many of whom had been brought there by female caretakers of color.

Perhaps because of some such condescension, we became privy to a loud conversation floating out the not-quite-closed door of the office next to which we were sitting. One of the doctors was chatting with a patient, expressing his general pique at the world in familiar, often contradictory clichés. He was upset at the loss of standards in schools. He pitted merit against equality and paired merit with white, Jewish and Asian students. He insisted that "we are not all equal" and concluded that affirmative action was inherently immoral. A few minutes later he blamed white liberals for abandoning standards and praised as standard-bearers those blacks who support vouchers. "The problem is" minorities who teach their children to hate white people. He said that "blacks are out of control" and that black leaders "are not taking responsibility." He cited Al Sharpton, Marion Barry and Louis Farrakhan as typical black leaders, and he rattled on against substance abuse in the inner cities and guns in the hands of young blacks who will never make it into the middle class, because they don't study and don't have good table manners.

"Bite down," he said as he finished with a paean of support for "zero tolerance" policies, standardized testing and George W. Bush.

George W. Bush! I shook my head wonderingly. If only he were black. It's one of those things we black people think about a lot: If only this or that one were black. Can you imagine, we tell each other.

Just think where a black man who spent more than half his adult life as a substance abuser would be--a black man who had a conviction for drunk driving and a notoriously bad attitude. Is it too obvious to point out that George Bush and Dick Cheney--who has two convictions for drunk driving--share a certain equality of status with Marion Barry?

Just think where a sneering black frat brother who committed gross grammatical butcheries and called Greeks Grecians would be. What fun Abigail Thernstrom could have questioning why unqualified upper-class whiners like that should be admitted to "first tier" universities like Yale and Harvard. (I guess we're supposed to feel better that Cheney flunked out of Yale on his own merits.)

Just think of where a black businessman with a "winning" personality but a losing financial record would be when he showed up to buy that team franchise. Assuming he could get a job way down in the corporate food chain, you can bet they wouldn't let him anywhere near the cash register.

Imagine a black politician who was so loudmouthed that his own family called him "bombastic," who proffered opinions about nations whose names he hadn't bothered to learn or badly mispronounced and who created an international incident by falsely accusing the Russian Prime Minister of stealing from the IMF. If you're thinking Al Sharpton, think again.

Imagine a black leader who began his campaign for office at a university that historically advocated racial separatism as God's law and that published materials describing Judaism as heretical and Catholicism as a "cult." I do wonder how it is that George W. can wander through so much of Louis Farrakhan's metaphysical territory and still come out looking like someone whose morals so many Americans say they can look up to.

I do not draw such analogies simply to relativize. The more important point, I think, is one related to what I sometimes call innocence profiling. If George W. Bush were black, he would be a classic suspect profile. If he were Driving While Black, there are people who would have forgiven police if they had decided to shoot at his drunkenly weaving car on that dark Maine highway (as New Jersey troopers shot at that van full of perfectly sober, cooperative college students). If he had been black, we might have heard Mayor Rudolph Giuliani describing him as "no altar boy" (as he described Patrick Dorismond, a security guard "accidentally" shot and killed by the NYPD).

But of course, George W. Bush is not black, and thus it is, perhaps, that the New York Times instead ran an article describing him as having tamed his "inner scamp" and entered "midlife redemption"--even as the article goes on to describe the supposedly redeemed man-who-would-be-Commander-in-Chief as having behaved so insultingly and inappropriately toward Queen Elizabeth at a state dinner in 1991--five years after he says he gave up alcohol--that a horrified Barbara Bush promised the Queen to seat him far away from Her Majesty, "for fear of him saying something."

The lesson of equality is, at its heart, related to the question of double standards: There are still too many examples in American society of the degree to which we have zero tolerance for disreputable black behavior and seemingly unlimited indulgence when whites behave the very same way.

Anyway, back at the medical center, the dentist's door flew open. "Next!" called out the doctor.

"Now set the teeth...," growled my dear old friend and lefty warrior as he marched into the office to face needles, drills...and more. "It won't be so bad," smiled the dentist unsuspectingly.

But my friend had been quoting Shakespeare's Henry V. "Teach them how to war..." he went on and winked at me. The door shut softly behind them.



December 24, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 22, 2014

From the classrooms to the streets, the movement keeps growing.

December 22, 2014


December 22, 2014


December 19, 2014


December 19, 2014

Here's to a new year!

December 19, 2014


December 19, 2014