An Apology for Profiling Ryan Moats (and any other Black) is never enough

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


Maybe Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle forgot this:

Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Article 2.131,

“A peace officer may not engage in racial profiling. Law enforcement-initiated action based on an individual's race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than on the individual's behavior or on information identifying the individual as having engaged in criminal activity.”

After the ordeal straight out of Hell that Houston Texans running back Ryan Moats went through the chief may have had a memory lapse. Moats who is African-American gets word that his wife’s mother is near death at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas (a Dallas suburb). He and his wife rush to the hospital to be at her side in her final hours. But Dallas police officer Robert Powell (white) has other ideas. He corrals Moats, his wife and another female passenger in the medical center parking lot and in what can only be described as a surreal scene, pulls his gun on them, waves it around at Moats, his wife, and orders them to stand down. He then turns two tone deaf ears to Moats’s frantic efforts to explain that his mother-in-law is inside dying. Instead he mouths off at him. Moats won’t say it he’s got too much class for that, but no matter how profusely the Dallas chief apologizes, which to his credit he did, Moats and his wife were racially profiled.

The bone head stop of Moat’s did more than give Dallas police a black eye and cause city official to scramble for damage control. It also cast suspicion on just how serious police agencies are in wiping out racial profiling. They all swear to the heavens that their officers don’t profile. They have to; they’ve taken to much heat for it. In fact, the Texas statute that forbids racial profiling mandates that all Texas police departments file annual stats on motorist stops—by race. Dallas patted itself on the back in a city report in 2008 for seriously addressing all areas of concern about racial profiling and evaluating department procedures to insure that it doesn’t happen. But the Moats stop proves that what the department puts on paper and what happens in the streets means it still has a long way to go to achieve its stated goal of providing “public service that is effective and fair.”

Powell in his weak kneed half hearted defense, wailed that he thought he was following procedure, and just doing his job. In a twisted way he’s probably right, and that’s even more reason to doubt that Dallas and indeed other departments are really doing all they say they are to root out racial profiling.

Even by the jaded and dumb action of far too many cops who still think good law enforcement is pulling every twenty something young black male that they eyeball on the streets over, Moats’s ordeal was extreme.

Moats should slap the Dallas and its police department with Mt. Everest dollar size lawsuit. That won’t bring back his mother-in-law or erase the pain of knowing that the moments he spent being hectored by Powell were moments that he should have been at his mother-in-law’s bedside. But Dallas still must pay, and pay dearly for that. An apology for what he went through is simply not enough.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard weekly in Los Angeles on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and nationally on blogtalkradio.com

Oakland Police Massacre Casts Ugly Glare on Ex-Felon Desperation

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


A general consensus is that it was a deadly mix of panic, rage, and frustration that caused Lovelle Mixon to snap. His shocking murderous rampage left 4 Oakland police officers dead and a city and police agencies in deep soul search abut what went so terribly wrong. Though Mixon’s killing spree is a horrible aberration, his plight as an unemployed, ex-felon isn’t. There are tens of thousands like him on America’s streets.

In 2007, the National Institute of Justice found that 60 percent of ex-felon offenders remain unemployed a year after their release. Other studies have shown that upwards of thirty percent of felon releases live in homeless shelters because of their inability to find housing; and those are the lucky ones. Many camp out on the streets.

A significant number of them suffer from drug, alcohol and mental health challenges, and lack education or any marketable skills. More than seventy percent of all U.S. prisoners are literate at only the two lowest grade levels. Nearly 60 % of violent felons are repeat offenders. They are menace to themselves and as the nation saw with Mixon, to others. In some cases, they can be set off by any real or perceived slight, insult, or simply lash out from bitter rage. Mixon was one and he made four Oakland police officers victims and left a terrible trail of grieving and distraught families and a shell-shocked city and police department.

The answer to the Mixons’ isn’t easy and simple. The need is strike a fine and delicate balance between public safety and ex-felon rehabilitation. A big obstacle to making ex-felons law abiding, productive citizens is still the inability of many ex-felons to find jobs. City officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, New York, and Atlanta have been repeatedly challenged to take action to end employer discrimination against ex-felons. The demand has been to restrict what employers can and can’t ask on job applications.

In a revealing study in 2003 and duplicated again several years later Northwestern University professor Devah Pager hired groups of African American and white young men with identical resumes and experience to pose as job applicants. Some were told to say they had a drug felony. The study found that a check when they checked the felony conviction box on applications it reduced the white applicants' chance of an interview by 50 %. For black applicants' their chance of landing the job was reduced by two-thirds.

To counter employer discrimination against ex-felons, nearly a dozen states and counties and cities have enacted laws in recent years to sharply limit what employers can ask applicants about criminal records. But that reform effort has stirred fierce resistance from employer groups. Washington D.C. is a near textbook example of that. Nearly 3,000 former prisoners are released and return to the District each year. Most fit the standard ex-felon profile. They are poor, with limited or education, and job skills, and come from broken or dysfunctional homes. Researchers again found that the single biggest thing that pushed them back to the streets, crime, violence and inevitably repeat incarceration was their failure to find work.

In 2007, the D.C. city council passed a measure that would have banned discrimination in employment as well as housing and education against ex-felons. It was vetoed by then Mayor Anthony A. Williams. The heat on Williams came from business groups who claimed that they’d be sued by rejected applicants.

Similar legislation has been kicking around in Congress since 2005. It hasn’t fared much better. The bill called the Second Chance Act is a relatively mild measure to pump about $100 million to local and state agencies for education, job and skills training, counseling, and family unification programs to stem the high rate of recidivism among ex-felons.

President Obama has often spoken of the need to unhinge the revolving door of felon release and reincarceration. He backs the Second Chance legislation. But with the economy and the financial crisis dominating the White House and Congressional agendas the likelihood that ex-felon aid will get immediate attention is slim.

In the meantime, the ranks of the felon underclass will continue to balloon. At last count, there were an estimated 12 million people in the U.S. with felony convictions. That’s nearly 10 percent of working-age population. And with jails bulging and states desperately trying to figure out how to cut jail costs and increasingly resorting to early release, more ex-felons will be on the streets. The current estimate is that more than 600,000 offenders are now being released from prisons yearly.

Mixon unfortunately was one of them. And others like him are ticking time bombs that endanger themselves and others. Oakland tragically showed that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard in Los Angeles on KTYM 1460 AM and nationally on blogtalkradio.com

AIG’s Minority Racket

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

AIG ignited the national firestorm of rage with its shell out of $160 to $600 million in tainted bonuses to its tainted executives. But what has gotten almost no attention is a big reason that AIG had to stiff the government and everyone else. That’s the role that the company played in the subprime loan racket; a racket that hurt and still hurts tens of thousands of would be black and Latino homeowners.
The lender’s bait and switch tactics, the deliberately garbled contracts, deceptive and faulty lending, questionable accounting practices, and charged hidden fees, all with the connivance of sleepy-eyed see-no-evil oversight of federal regulators, are well known and documented. Their snake oil loan peddling wreaked havoc with thousands of mostly poor, strapped homeowners. A disproportionate number of them were Latinos and African-Americans.
Enter AIG. It saw a, treasure trove of fast buck riches in the subprime business. AIG dumped $33 billion into bonds and securities that were tied directly to subprime loans. This was nearly four times more than the next insurer, the German-based Allianz SE, had invested in the subprime loans. In fact, AIG was the only US based life insurer that had more than 3 percent of their general account assets in debts tied to subprime loans.
In early 2007 things started to unravel. AIG reported a first quarter loss of more than $2 billion in its subprime mortgage bonds. This set off the first warning bell that AIG could implode. Bond traders openly worried that AIG’s subprime securities losses could drag the market down. They had good reason to worry.
AIG is first and foremost an insurer. And in addition to its plunging bond and security holdings, the company also insured restructured subprime home bonds. The assumption by the subrprime bond holders was that the bonds would lose only a fraction of their value. But by then subprime defaults had piled up to a ten year high and the subprime lending market, that was all of it stocks, bonds and insurance, had badly frayed.


AIG’s stock had plunged 60 percent within the year. The top rating agencies, Moody's and Standard and Poor's, concerned over AIG’s continuing losses on subprime and other mortgage-backed securities, downgraded their credit rating. They demanded that company pay billions to creditors in order to bump back up their ratings. That was billions that AIG by then didn’t have.


AIG was clearly on a non stop down hill roller coaster ride, and many banks and lenders, were heading to perdition with them. AIG briefly flirted with the notion of filing for subprime mortgage lenders bankruptcy.
But there was a better deal to be had courtesy of a panicked then President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. They shoved out tens of billions in cash in what turned out to be only the first installment of cash to save AIG’s hide.
We may never know the full extent of the financial damage that AIG caused in the subprime market. Nor how manyprospective minority homeowners suffered losses both financial and personal from the company’s greed. United for a Fair Economy, a public advocacy research group, in an in-depth study on sub prime lending estimates that the tab for minorities for the dubious blending practices runs to more than $200 billion in lost equity and income during the years AIG and the subprime bank lenders ran amok. The group called the home losses the most massive loss of wealth for African Americans in U.S. history.
The ultimate tragedy is that many blacks who were enticed by the lenders through their web of lies and deceit into taking the risky sub prime loans didn’t really need them. Data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act found that about 40 percent of the black subprime borrowers could have qualified for cheaper mainstream mortgages.
But that was the last thing that the subprime lenders, let alone AIG wanted. This would have taken a big bite out of their fantasy level profits. In the end those profits turned out to be a smoke and mirrors illusion just as the subprime illusion was.
AIG happily aided and abetted the banks and lenders in their decade long fast and loose play with the lending rules. Taxpayers are, of course, paying and paying dearly for AIG’s greed and malfeasance. But thousands of black and Latino hoped to be homeowners are also paying for that greed. AIG’s minority racket is yet another sorry chapter in the AIG saga.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

Norris’s Nutty War on President Obama

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


Chuck Norris claims that thousands of right wing cell groups exist and will rebel against the U.S. government. It’s tempting to laugh away his vow to wage war against President Obama as either the crackpot ravings of a washed up Z grade martial arts actor. Or as a cheap promotional stunt to get his mug back in front of the cameras. Norris’s bellicose rants against Obama are nothing new and they have gotten wide play in a shrill horde of on line blogs and websites, including the popular right wing sounding board WorldNet Daily.com. Norris will culminate his holy war against Obama with a big recruiting pitch in a live telecast scheduled appropriately for Friday the 13th (March). He’ll call on thousands to “surround” Obama and the dark forces that seek to subvert God, country, and liberty.
Unfortunately, Norris will have plenty of recruits. Two weeks before he bellowed his anti-Obama tripe, the Southern Poverty Law Center once more sounded its own warning that hate groups are on the rise. There are now nearly a thousand of them, and they’re in just about every state. They aren't just the catalogue of usual suspects--- neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, skinheads, Klansman, Aryan nation and Skinheads that exclusively roam around the Deep South. They’re all over. California leads the pack with nearly 100 identifiable groups. The Center fingered several dozen websites from the explicit Ihateobama.com site to groups with flag draped names like the sovereign citizen’s movement.
Then there’s the legion of sites that busily spewed anti-Obama venom before the election and haven’t missed a beat since.

AntiObama.net A Clockwork Obama AgainstObama.com AudacityOfHypocrisy.com BlockBarack.com ChicagoAgainstObama.com DiscoverObama.com DontVoteObama.net DrNObama.com ExposeObama.com InvestigateBarackObama.blogspot.com JewsAgainstObama.com JustSayNoDeal.com MeetBarackObama.com No-bama.blogspot.com NobamaNetwork.com NobamaZone.com NoExperienceNoChange.org NoQuarterUSA.net ObamaExposed.blogspot.com ObamaBlog08.com Obama-Wire.com Obamaism.Blogspot.com ObamaNation.com ObamaTruth.org ObamaWho.wordpress.com ObamaWTF.blogspot.com Obamology.blogspot.com SavagePolitics.com SlickBarry.com Stop-Obama.org TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com TopShelf51.wordpress.com

The majority of the hate groups and the wacky anti-Obama websites are like Norris just hot air talk and delusional conspiracy stuff. They all hotly deny that they advocate violence. Yet, the number of hate crimes according to FBI statistics, and that’s real violent crimes, edged up to over 7000 in 2007. The number of these crimes has been fairly consistent since the FBI began compiling hate crime statistics more than a decade ago. They’re just the tip of the hate iceberg. Experts say the number of hate crimes could be ten times higher since most hate crimes go unreported.
But even that in itself might not be cause for alarm since most of the hate groups are well known, tracked, and when their members commit crimes are hit hard with federal prosecutions. It certainly would not be enough to give much credence to Norris’s crackpot call. That is if times were better. But when jobs and homes are lost, and there’s fear and uncertainty that things could get worse, the ruthless search for scapegoats—illegal immigrants, gays, Jews, blacks, and a history making president—are on with a vengeance. It takes little imagination to see that this could set off one emotionally unscrewed, gun culture obsessed looney. The murderous rampage by Alabama shooter Michael McLendon who was hell bent on wiping out a whole town was ample proof of that.
Norris, and the legion of other right side gassers and bloggers, mask their bigot tinged appeals to the mob with the usual wink and nod patriotic sounding code words, slogans, and phrases. In his WorldNetDaily columns, Norris tosses out gems such as the “second American revolution,” “new government,” the authority of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” “threat to religious freedom,” and “protect and save free enterprise” in his call for a citizen rising against President Obama.
The acidic dripping slogans just happen to be the same ones that stir the deep fury, hatred and resentment among a handful of the loose hinged malcontents and hate mongers. As has been amply documented, the thick list of fringe and hate groups as well as the hordes of unbalanced violence prone individuals running free in America can fill a telephone book. The long history of hate violence in America further is more than enough to raise the antenna on the danger of violence against prominent political figures.

Obama well knows the horrid violent history of America and the very real danger that violence poses to many Americans and especially a charismatic president who still energizes and excites millions and is determined to deliver on his promise of political change and implicitly racial change. The exact things that drives Norris nuts and many others that are nuts to cheer him.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

The Limbaugh Strawman

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

First President Barack Obama stroked talk show kingpin Rush Limbaugh’s ego by proclaiming him the pied piper of the GOP. Next Republican National Chair Michael Steele showed some moxie and publicly told Limbaugh that he was the shot caller in the GOP. That didn’t last. In the next breath, he publicly pleaded for forgiveness from Limbaugh for his momentary pique. Then top Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel jumped in and lathered Limbaugh with praise and scorn as the boss of the GOP. Obama and Emanuel had an ulterior motive. They propped up Limbaugh as their straw man to tar the GOP as an antique, discredited, and obstructionist bunch of sore losers who will stop at nothing to derail Obama’s policies. Steele is just simply running scared of Limbaugh.
But in either case, they have done what Limbaugh couldn’t do for himself and that’s to wildly inflate his importance as the GOP kingmaker. Limbaugh got the kind of promotion that ad companies spend millions on for nothing. But it’s still nothing but hot air. Limbaugh hasn’t stopped one Obama staff or cabinet appointment, prevented one policy directive, executive order, or a single piece of legislation. That includes Limbaugh’s favorite target Obama’s economic stimulus bill. Heck, Limbaugh couldn’t even stop his arch nemesis, Al Franken, from bagging the Minnesota senate seat. Franken’s the guy who outrageously wolf ticketed Limbaugh as the big fat idiot, and then turned the wolfing into a best selling book.
Limbaugh’s rambling, long winded, rant at the Conservative Political Action Conference, complete with his confusion over what the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence say, was the topper. The crowd which was heavily white and male, lapped up every Limbaugh inanity. A stroll through the convention hall showed that the crowd’s Cloud Nine divorce from political reality was almost laughable. Every anti in America—taxes, gay rights, gun control, and government, as well as touting their darling Sarah Palin—was on display there. This does a lot to further seal the GOP’s lot as a party that is stepping fast toward becoming a self-marginalized, mean spirited, faded political entity.

This isn't the first time that the Obama team created and then punched away at a GOP strawman target. When Republican rival John McCain plopped Sarah Palin on his ticket, a top Team Obama member reflexively hammered Palin. Obama quickly realized that it was a colossal mistake. He did the smart thing and simply congratulated her on being picked as McCain's VP candidate and then went back to talking about the issues. He knew not to make her the issue. But the lesson hasn’t stuck in the case of Limbaugh.

By making Limbaugh bigger than life in American politics, it gives steam to his inflammatory campaign of rumors, half truths, distortions, and flat out lies about Obama, liberals, and now Steele. Limbaugh’s aim with Steele is to further cow the GOP into line; the line that forms behind him.


At the start of his tenure as RNC chair, Steele had the good sense to know that kowtowing to Limbaugh was a prescription for even bigger disaster for the GOP. He resuscitated the old Bush line circa 2000, and talked about making the GOP a party of big tent diversity. Then like Bush he promptly forgot it.

That’s exactly what Limbaugh with his conservative white man’s litmus test for the GOP wants. But that flies in the face of what Obama’s election triumph showed. That is that the country's fast changing ethnic vote demographics looks nothing like it did a decade ago. Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters now make up nearly a quarter of the nation's electorate. College educated whites make up more than one-third of the vote. Limbaugh’s comfort zone voter demographic; white blue collar, heartland and deep South voters have shrunk to less than forty percent of the nation’s voters. Immigration, higher birth rates, and the youth trends will continue to swell the numbers of minority and youth voters. The white electorate overall will continue to decline.

It's not only the numbers that work against the GOP. It's also ideology. The Democrat's expanding core base of voters is more moderate, socially active, and pro government; the exact opposite of what Limbaugh rants for.
Obama, Emanuel, and Steele know this. The Democrats would not have won the White House and Steele would not have beat out a pack of mostly Limbaugh fawning contenders for the RNC top spot if that hadn’t been true.
Still, Limbaugh has one powerful tool to bully, badger and cajole the GOP and saber rattle Obama. That’s the airwaves. He’ll exploit it to the hilt. But that won’t make him the boss of the GOP let alone any real threat to Obama. It’ll just make him an inviting and convenient strawman.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

The Murdoch Non-Apology

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The day the New York Post sleazed its op-ed section with the vile, vicious, and veiled urge to violence cartoon against President Barack Obama this writer demanded that Post boss Rupert Murdoch issue this statement.
“The News Corporation pledges that the Post’s offensive cartoon will not be circulated, or reprinted, or syndicated. Further, we have zero tolerance toward racially insensitive and inflammatory cartoons or editorial depictions of African-Americans and other ethnic groups. Finally, we apologize for the Obama cartoon and pledge in the future that the Post and other Murdoch entities will hold to the highest standard of editorial sensitivity in our cartoons.”
Though it took a firestorm week of massive demonstrations, threats of a boycott, and an FCC license challenge (the Murdoch owned Fox Network), and a Mt. Everest sized stack of emails, letters, and faxes demanding the firing of Post management, Murdoch pretty much issued a statement that came close to what this writer demanded.
But that by no means closes the book on the sorry Post-Murdoch-Fox saga. It can, and probably will happen again. Start with Murdoch’s apology. There were three escape clauses buried in it. One is the self-serving, lame Post defense that the cartoon was just fun and games spoofery of Obama’s stimulus plan. The other is a rehash of the other Post editor’s fall back line that the cartoon was not meant to be racist. Murdoch’s final give the paper a pass defense was his declaration that the cartoon was “interpreted” as racist by “others.”
That’s not a whole heck of a lot better than the non-apology, apology Post editors issued a day after their public shellacking.


But even if Murdoch had made a sincere bare-the-chest heartfelt apology it wouldn’t amount to much. That’s the standard ploy that shock jocks, GOP big wigs, and assorted public personalities employ when they get caught with their racial pants down.
On a few occasions the offenders have been reprimanded, suspended, and even dumped. That won’t happen with the Post editors, or the offending cartoonist, and Murdoch gave absolutely no hint that anyone would be disciplined for the racial slander. There are two reasons why. They tell much about why the Post, Murdoch’s media empire, and shock jocks can get away with demeaning gays, blacks, Latinos Asians, Muslims, and women and skip away with a caressing hand slap.
One is that these guys ramp up ratings and that make media syndicates such as Fox and the Post’s cash registers jingle.


The other reason is that it’s virtually impossible to effectively muzzle cartoonists such as Sean Delonas and others that draw or talk race trash is the sphinx like silence of top politicians, broadcast industry leaders, and corporate sponsors.
Sharpton, Spike Lee, and a handful of local New York politicians led the charge against the Post, but that’s pretty much where it ended. The problem of the silence or perfunctory belated criticism by higher ups to racial taunts surfaced a few years ago following then Senate Majority leader designate Trent Lott’s veiled tout of segregation. It touched off a furor, and ultimately Lott stepped down from the post, but it took nearly a week for Bush to make a stumbling, and weak sounding disavowal of him. The silence from top politicians and industry leaders to public racism was even more deafening a few of years ago when former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett made his weird taunt that aborting black babies could reduce crime. Even as calls were made from the usual circles almost always blacks and liberal Democrats for an apology, or his firing from his syndicated national radio show, neither Bush or any other top GOP leader said a mumbling word about Bennett.

There’s another reason for their silence. The last two decades many Americans have become much too comfortable using code language to bash and denigrate blacks. In the 1970s, the vocabulary of covert racially loaded terms included terms such as "law and order," “crime in the streets," "permissive society," "welfare cheats," "subculture of violence," "subculture of poverty," "culturally deprived" and "lack of family values" seeped into the American lexicon about blacks. Some politicians seeking to exploit white racial fears routinely tossed about these terms.
In the 1980s new terms such as "crime prone," "war zone," "gang infested," "crack plagued," "drug turfs," "drug zombies," "violence scarred," "ghetto outcasts" and "ghetto poverty syndrome” were shoved into public discourse. These were covert racial code terms for blacks and they further reinforced the negative image of young black males as dope dealers, drive by shooters, and educational cripples. And the image of young black women as a dysfunctional collection of B’s and “hos,” welfare queens, and baby makers.
Obama is hardly exempt from this irresponsible race tinged character assault. The non-stop whisper and slander campaign against President Obama by packs of bloggers, talk jocks, and even a senator on the legitimacy of his US citizenship is a case in point.
The loud demands will continue that Murdoch back up his kind of sort of apology with real action. But he won’t. There’s simply too much money in racial trash talk (and cartooning), and too much silence from the higher ups that send a tacit signal condoning it. That silence is Murdoch’s ultimate trump card.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

Mr. Murdoch Is Obama Really a Chimp?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Mr. Rupert Murdoch it’s certainly no surprise to you that New York Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan would hotly defend the racist Post cartoon comparing President Obama to a chimp. That’s what your shock and smut dealing Post is in the business of doing and it does it well. The idea of course is to get the tongues furiously wagging, get enraged emails, letters and phone calls pouring in, and then put forth the predictable defense calling this and other inflammatory cartoons a parody, a free speech right, and harmless spoofery. Allan didn’t stop there. He couldn’t resist the urge to take a swipe at Al Sharpton, branding him with the standard tag of race baiter and media hound for daring to call out the Post on the vile cartoon.

The furor might have drawn little more than a public yawn and shrug except for two two small points. One is the long, sordid and savage history of racist stereotyping of African-Americans. A few grotesque book titles from a century ago, such as The Negro a Beast, The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization, and the Clansman depicted blacks as apes, monkeys, bestial, and animal like. The image stuck in books, magazines, journals, and deeply colored the thinking of many Americans of that day.

Yes, Mr. Murdoch, it’s true that was a long time ago, and as Allan intimated in his lame defense of the Post cartoon, no sober person could seriously believe that anyone would liken the President or for that matter any black to a chimp. Unfortunately, a lot still do.

That’s the second small point about the Post cartoon. Post Cartoonist Sean Delonas could so casually and easily depict Obama as a monkey because that image didn’t die a century, half century, decade, or even a year ago. In fact, exactly a year ago, Penn State researchers conducted six separate studies and found that many Americans still link blacks with apes and monkeys. Many of them were young, and had absolutely no knowledge of the vicious stereotyping of blacks of years past. Their findings with the provocative title "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," in the February 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was published by the American Psychological Association.

Please keep in mind Mr. Murdoch that the overwhelming majority of the participants in the studies bristled probably as undoubtedly you would at the faintest hint that they had any racial bias. But the animal savagery image and blacks was very much on their minds. The researchers found that participants, and that included even those with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images, were quicker to associate blacks with apes than they were to associate whites with apes.

This was not simply a dry academic exercise. The animal association and blacks has had devastating real life consequences. In hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 the Philadelphia Inquirer was much more likely to describe African Americans than Whites convicted of capital crimes with ape-relevant language, such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." And jurors in criminal cases were far more likely to judge blacks more harshly than whites, and regard them and their crimes as savage, bestial, and heinous, and slap them with tougher sentences than whites.

The Post cartoon, Mr. Murdoch, was the complete package. It depicted violence, death, brutality, incitement, and animal like imagery. The topper was the not so subtle inference that the target of the chimp depiction and more was an African-American male, namely President Obama.

In recent days, Mr Murcdoch you’ve dropped a hint or two that you want to put the word balance back into the vocabulary of those who run your media empire. You can start by issuing this statement.

“News Corporation pledges that the Post’s offensive cartoon will not be circulated, or reprinted, or syndicated. Further, we have zero tolerance toward racially insensitive and inflammatory cartoons or editorial depictions of African-Americans and other ethnic groups. Finally, we apologize for the Obama cartoon and pledge in the future that the Post and other Murdoch entities will hold to the highest standard of editorial sensitivity in our cartoons.”

You’ll issue that statement Mr. Murdoch if you are personally repelled by the comparison of President Obama to a chimp. That is so, right Mr. Murdoch?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).