Race & Identity

About the only thing as disappointing as the frivolous arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was the loud, almost gleeful chorus of "I told you so's" coming from his defenders. You've heard of schadenfreude -- taking pleasure in the suffering of others? Well, this was the peculiar political version. It's not that commentators were happy that Gates had allegedly been mistreated.

The Root: We've all seen the police and media reports around your arrest last Thursday in Cambridge, Mass., Charles Ogletree issued a statement to The Root that included a synopsis of the incident. But what have you been going through since Thursday?

President Obama's visit to Ghana this month was downright biblical.

Columns of paramilitary police are now keeping a tenuous peace in Urumqi, the western Chinese city where more than 1,000 Uighurs rioted ten days ago in the bloodiest clash in decades between the authorities and the Turkic-speaking Muslim minority group.

Barack Obama promised to transform health care and energy and America's role in the world. But what made tens of millions of Americans loopy with joy is the implicit promise that the young biracial senator would, through the power of his biography and charisma, heal racial divides. Throughout the presidential campaign and the brief but blissful post-inaugural delirium, countless trend pieces vividly described how blacks and whites were--gasp!--chatting amiably. They were giving each other Obama-inspired fist-bumps.

On Sunday, more than 1,000 Uighurs clashed with police in the western Chinese city of Urumqi -- marking one of the country's bloodiest ethnic conflicts in recent years.

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks's grandparents.

President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court justice has been widely hailed as a triumph for Latinos. But it could just as likely spell the end of the very idea that there is such a thing as Latino America at all.

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks's grandparents.

In The House At The End Of The Road, W. Ralph Eubanks tells the story of his white grandfather, James Morgan Richardson, and black grandmother, Edna Howell. Jim and Edna married around 1914, in defiance of his middle-class family.

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