HuffPost's misguided step: a segregated website [View All]

[pampango]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F01%2F25%2FEDUK1HE111.DTL

When the subject is race or ethnicity, conservatives usually flunk the course. Their modus operandi is to use minorities as foils, all to get the votes of white people.

Think Willie Horton. Or the debate over what the right calls reverse discrimination. Consider the immigration issue, much of which is guided by xenophobia. Or the schoolyard bullying of Sonia Sotomayor by Republican senators because she dared to suggest that white males might be at a disadvantage without the insights of a "wise Latina."

Alas, the alternative isn't much better. Despite polls that show most Americans give the left higher marks on race relations, the truth is that liberals usually don't get better than a "C" - for condescending. And sadly, even when liberals try to do the right thing and be more inclusive, they can't surrender the need to maintain control, which leads them to open the door only a crack and remind everyone just how exclusive their club really is.

Case in point: Plans by the unabashedly left-leaning Huffington Post to launch a special section of the website devoted to African Americans and another section for Latinos. What's the next trend in cyberspace? Segregated lunch counters? As the Internet age sprints forward, is it also going backward? Are the new media picking up old bad habits?

Doesn't seem that a website offering special sections designed to appeal to minorities is the same concept as forcing them to segregated lunch counters.