So, who's screening out Black callers? Very likely people who are less educated and earn less money than those on the other end. In some instances a White person conducting business over the phone may be asked to practice linguistic profiling by his or her supervisor. Smith mentions a case in Alabama where a White apartment manager contacted the local Fair Housing group to report that the apartment owner told her if she suspected that a caller was Black, to tell him or her nothing was available. Smith also recalls a conversation she had with a White woman working for an employment services company, who had been instructed to get callers to say the word "ask." If they pronounced it "ax," that was one way of identifying them as African-American. (Baugh says that particular pronunciation is most commonly associated with Blacks.) Smith, who is White, says, "We get to hear these things all the time."

The only way to put a stop to linguistic profiling is for those who know about it to report it and make the offenders pay. No need for Blacks to hire speech coaches. What's called for is not more pear-shaped tones, but more organizational muscle, exercised by the likes of the NFHA and its local affiliates.

The fact of the matter is, there’s nothing whatever that’s seriously radical or progressive about hip-hop ideas and values.  It is sad that there are university academics among us like Michael Dyson and Todd Boyd (respectively at the University of Pennsylvania and University of California) who fail to recognize the political emptiness of most hip-hop expression. Hip-hop entertainers and its entertainment modalities do not represent a “new worldview” for African Americans. Quite the contrary, the “hip-hop worldview” is nothing other than an updated face on the old-hat, crude, anti-humanistic values of hedonism and materialism.

Having to grapple with the real world is stressful, and people with relative power and privilege never know how to deal with stress very well. As such, they long for and applaud easy answers for the stress that occasionally manages to intrude upon their lives: so they blame people of color for high taxes, failing schools, crime, drugs, and jobs they didn’t get; they blame terrorism on “evil,” and the notion that they hate our freedoms: a belief one can only have if one really thinks one lives in a free country in the first place.

In other words, delusion is both the fuel that propels people like Ronald Reagan forward in political life, and then makes a rational assessment of his legacy impossible upon his death.

I think this is why so many white people remember him fondly, and are truly crestfallen at the thought of his physical obsolescence: simply put, much of white America needs Ronald Reagan; a father figure to tell them everything is going to be O.K.; a kindly old Wizard of Oz, to assure them that image and reality are one, even when the more cerebral parts of our beings tend towards an opposite conclusion.

With Reagan gone, maintaining the illusion becomes more difficult.

But knowing white folks – I am after all one of them, and have been surrounded by them all of my life – I have little doubt that where there’s a will to remain in la-la land, we will surely find a way.

Reagan has been released from the lie, finally, and may his soul find peace among the millions of dearly departed victims of his policies around the world.

As researchers and activists pointed out long before the jetliner attacks “changed everything,” the available stock of such housing in Chicago is insufficient to absorb the displaced public housing population.  That population is “free” to be homeless, thanks to the working of economic forces that carry social costs of secondary concern to local policymakers.  Those policymakers, including the Mayor, are beholden to commercial and real estate property developers seeking to remove poor black inner city residents from choice urban investment locations.

Next issue to be published September 2, 2004.