Paris’ 19th Arrondissement, one of the cities poorest and most racially diverse districts, is suffering from increases in gang violence this month, but locals are questioning how much race and religion are instigating attacks.    Even many social workers argue that the fighting is over turf and heightened by class tensions as the neighborhood becomes more gentrified.   While perhaps race and religion are not the sole driving forces, much of the violence has occurred between Muslim youths of North African decent and Jewish teenagers.

Morad Chahrine, who directs the J2P social and cultural center, explains:

‘It’s less about anti-Semitism than fights among gangs of youths, who create alliances of one district against another,’ Mr. Chahrine said, noting the influence of American movies on the styles and habits of the gangs. ‘This idea of identity of territory starts with economic reasons. This is the youngest and poorest arrondissement in Paris, with a lot of unemployment, and that explains a lot.’- NY Times

Great to hear our culture serves as such an excellent role model to the kids of Paris.   It’s a terribly upsetting situation, particularly when you consider that the motivation for the violence begins with self-hatred:

Mouada Abdelali, an artist who worked on youth projects, said that he had seen local French youths repeatedly stigmatised for their skin colour or immigrant descent. “One teenager said to me: “I hate everyone even myself”. How do you deal with that?” - Guardian UK

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As the election heats up and folks begin to take things more personally, I was relieved to see a story on NPR that looked beyond the party lines and the mud being slung between the two. The piece, called “A Conversation: How Race Influences Two Voters” features a conversation between Greg Harden of Rochester, N.Y., and Trish Callahan of Portland, Maine - two people with very different backgrounds. Harden is white and has spent most of his life in the suburbs, while Callahan has a black biological father and a white biological mother but was raised by a white adopted family.

takepart to listen to the discussion now and takepart to join the discussion yourself and talk this issue through.

Race is of course a big issue this go around because Barack Obama is the first African-American presidential candidate.

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Juneteenth is an annual holiday that commemorates the abolition of slavery in Texas. On June 19, 1865,- two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect- Union soldiers sailed into Galveston, Texas, announced the end of the Civil War. They read aloud a general order freeing the quarter-million slaves residing in the state and that day has become known as Juneteenth.

Top 10 Films to Watch on Juneteenth:

1) To Kill A Mockingbird

Based on Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning book of 1960, this film tells the story of Atticus Finch, a lawyer in a racially divided Alabama town in the 1930s. He agrees to defend a young black man who is accused of raping a white woman.

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Margaret Cho has had a huge influence on my career. Her candid discussions on self image, her fearless energy, and of course her immigrant mom impressions (I too have an adorable immigrant Mom that makes her way into many of my jokes) have always inspired me. After I read “I’m the One that I Want” I was officially a huge fan. That book bluntly and beautifully examined the racial and size prejudices in Hollywood.

Check out this clip from the “I’m the One that I Want” show:

Not only an artist but also an activist, Cho recently received the First Amendment Award from the ACLU of Southern California, and the Intrepid Award from the

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The “Reverend Wright is Wrong” refrain has been repeated endlessly this past week as pundits on both sides weigh in on the racial and religious controversy that’s rocked the Obama campaign. Martin Luther King, Jr. touched on this not-so-divine divide 45 years ago:

“We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation.”   

Sunday morning in our household is, by contrast, the one time during the week when we suspend our secular segregation and tune in to the hot air from beltway blowhards on both sides of the partisan divide. On rare occasions, we even agree with an aside from George Will or a point made by Pat Buchanan.

But Wall Street Journal pundit Peggy Noonan literally gave us pause on Meet the Press yesterday when she responded to a question from Tim Russert about Obama’s seminal speech so reasonably that we had to grab the remote, rewind, and relisten:

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“The Race Card” by Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, takes a colorblind approach to the claims of bias that permeate the contemporary American discourse on race. In a country that seems to possess fewer and fewer outright racists, why do a growing number of people profess to be victims of racism?

Racism still exists, argues Ford, but the civil rights movement has made it reprehensible in the eyes of most Americans. Changes in the law have created penalties for blatant racism, but as a result racial issues have come to involve “ambiguous facts and inscrutable motives.” For instance, Danny Glover inspired a citywide crackdown on cabbies refusing to pick up black folks after an available taxi driver passed him up in New York in the 1990s. Yet, as Ford points out, many drivers who refuse to pick up black passengers are also black. Ford also says that cabbies might be motivated more by a desire to avoid longer drives into rougher neighborhoods rather than simply an aversion to black passengers.

You can by reading available excerpts of the book on Slate.com. Also, by reading the transcripts from a Q&A with the author held today on washingtonpost.com.

Contrary to popular belief, I do not follow sports. But every now and then, sports, by virtue of its popularity, accessibility, and (I’ve heard, though not experienced) entertainability highlights a social, cultural or political problem, bringing it to a broad, far-reaching audience in a way few other media could.

Such is the case of the cricket scandal, which I saw first hand (through TV) while I was in India last month. First,  India’s cricket player Harbhajan Singh was accused of calling Andrew Symonds, a Jamaican player (the only Jamaican player) on Australia’s team a “monkey.”

Then cricket fanatics blame the umpire, who sided with Symonds, and happened to be Jamaican too, and burn him in efegy.

Yesterday, a Cricket judge cleared Singh of the “racial abuse charge” and said Symonds had provoked his opponent (into being a racist?). And the case seemed closed. Until the same judge said that he shouldn’t have cleared Singh. But he did because of human error. Sound complicated? It is. Read more here.

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