Eli Sanders explains how the new movie Milk examines the idea of California:
"We can come home," Milk, as played with impressive intuition and bravery by Penn, tells a cheering crowd of activists in San Francisco on the night that Prop. 6 was defeated.If you think about it, the statement doesn't make much literal sense. Milk, the first openly gay man to serve in elected office in the United States, was not himself from San Francisco. He was, instead, like most of the people he befriended and worked with in the gay rights movement there, a refugee (in his case, from a closeted life in New York’s financial world) who had come to the Castro to start over as an out gay man. If San Francisco was Milk’s home, it was a new one, and in any case he hadn't left it. So what was he talking about coming home to?
Adam Serwer explains why people need to accept that Barack Obama is black:
If identifying biracial people as black "validates the separation of the races" then there is perhaps no one contributing more to the cause of these neo-segregationists than Barack Obama himself. "My view has always been that I'm African-American," Obama told Chicago Tribune reporter Dawn Turner Trice back in 2004. "African Americans by definition, we're a hybrid people." In seeking a validation of her own ideas about race and racial identity, and by casting Obama as the victim of a reductive racial vocabulary, Arenas simply ignores the will of her subject. But racial categories are only unjust insofar as they prevent people from identifying how they wish. Arenas is doing exactly what she is attempting to prevent, forcing Obama into the racial category of her, rather than his own, choosing.
And Terence Samuel wonders why Obama hasn't tried to appease the left with his cabinet appointments:
It is hard not to admire the high-octane efficiency of the team Obama -- no missteps, no second guessing, no regrets. Oodles of brain power and steady to the point of dullness. But there is an element of appeasement to the enterprise that seems noteworthy to me, particularly if Obama decides that the only part of the base that does not need to be appeased is the left.
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--The Editors
