The media once again shows us its utter lack of institutional memory by rediscovering that, hey, there's a lot of black folks that don't particularly like Jesse Jackson. Perish the thought! They've only been discovering this for, what, the past thirty years or so?

I also liked the extremely careful "we-can't-say-we-don't-like-him" tone of the report. After all, this guy's a founding member of the liberal establishment, and that's a pantheon who's membership makes tenured professors envious. Far be it from us to imply Jackson might be just a wee bit irrelevant... we'll just let these crackers from the south take that bullet for us. Oh, and by the way, the only people who don't know what "cracker" means in that context are your UCLA-journalism-graduate friends.

It does puzzle me, however, that there aren't more (any?) black folks in racing. Willie T. Ribbs was the last serious contender that I can recall, and that was way back in my high school days. Of course, there are only a handful of women race car drivers (and only one that I know of outside of drag racing), so if discrimination is playing a factor it's not just skin color they're using.

I think it's probably a lot more complicated than just discrimination. Motor sports is an extremely challenging field to break into. It's no coincidence that the best and brightest race car drivers run in families... it's not the genetics, it's the connections. It's also damned expensive, and the squirrels that run corporate sponsor programs are always looking for the safest, most comfortable fit for their corporate dollar.

Oh, I don't doubt there's discrimination of some sort out there. This is America after all, and NASCAR in particular has a culture that dates back to a time and place in American history we'd all as soon put behind us. But it's all a lot more professional today than it was even ten years ago, and my own opinion is that if a black guy or a woman were to race and "trade paint" as hard as everyone else, and win a few, they'd be accepted as readily as anyone else.