Musing about February

February? It's not even Christmas yet!

But February is Black History Month, and I'm always looking for a new angle to tackle the subject in my church . I think the topic's still important, and that was before I skimmed the US Human Rights Network finding that "the US Report On Race Covers Up Reality of Discrimination in America".

I'm interested in the New Demographic workshops. I'm intrigued by the titles. As important as I think the topic is, quite often, diversity training DOES suck. The core beliefs work for me. I'll have to price these seminars. I'm also intrigued by a recent report which indicates that We're ALL prejudiced; Now what? Some New Demographic article I can't puts my hands on addresses this as well in a different light. To say one does not see color, usually in some hyperbolic terms such as "I don't care if he's black, white, red, yellow or purple polka-dots, because I don't see color" is insulting. It's insulting because virtually ALL of us see color, just as we see gender and age and hair color and height and weight. (So, Lefty, I WAS kidding when I "confused" you with the musician Chris Brown.)

So if you've come across a fresh way to talk about race, racism, racialism in America, please let me know.
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I don't know what "liberal" and "conservative" mean. Listening to the Writer's Guild, I'd find the six big production companies to be conservative, trying to maintain the status quo. But I get regular e-mails from self-proclaimed conservative groups, and Human Events writes: "liberal media giant Time Warner lobbied the federal government's taxpayer-subsidized mail-delivery monopoly, aka the United States Postal Service, to hit us with a postal hike that will cost us an extra $120,000 per year to deliver HUMAN EVENTS -- a shocking sum we simply cannot afford to pay.

"Our subscribers and supporters are rightly outraged about liberal Time Warner's machinations that can put smaller competitors such as HUMAN EVENTS out of business." By liberal, the group means that...well, I'm not sure. Limiting access to a variety of forms of information - where exactly does that fit on the political spectrum?

ROG