Word: racism
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Player haters. Maybe that's the deal. Jealous people are always player-hating the Williams sisters, calling them arrogant or aloof or unfocused on tennis. Maybe it's sexism, the resentment of a dominant pro athlete's braggadocio, seen as unseemly in a woman. Maybe it's simple racism. Or maybe it's just that the Williams sisters, as good as they are, are kind of arrogant and aloof and unfocused on tennis. "People criticize me as being arrogant," Venus said last Monday during a tournament in New Haven, Conn., her toy Yorkshire popping out of her Kate Spade...
...global forum on racism and its remedies was never going to be a buy-the-world-a-Coke lovefest, but it's in danger of descending into a deeply weird Tower of Babel experience. Even the Middle East conflict, which has come to dominate the spotlight at the U.N.-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, produces its own strangely dissonant images: Hasidic Jews from New York bearing placards proclaiming that "Zionism equals Anti-Semitism," or Mary Robinson, the U.N.'s Irish Catholic human rights commissioner proclaiming that when she sees vicious anti-Semitic slurs, "I am a Jew." (Sorry, Mary...
...town. Everyone from Latinos to Gypsies is pressing their own legitimate grievances, and even the generic anti-globalization protestors are showing up. Screaming ironies abound: Here you'll find Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, author of a cynical pogrom to drive white farmers off the land, on "Landlessness as Racism...
...though, the debate is shaped by the old divides of North and South. It's easy for Westerners to be smug and self-satisfied, having convinced themselves that they've eliminated racism. But for the most part, the powerful industrialized nations have not been racism's victims, but its perpetrators. And as easy as it is to beat up on India for denying caste oppression or the Sudan for its continued slavery, the poppycock of Britain's "slavery is a crime now that we're no longer practicing it; it was simply regrettable when we were doing it" reflects...
...worth asking whether a U.S. boycott of the racism conference actually helps Israel in the long run. Israel needs the U.S., but it needs a U.S. that's a credible mediator in any future revival of the peace process. And right now, the Bush administration is hardly burnishing its image as an "honest broker." Moreover, while it has eschewed President Clinton's hands-on refereeing role, the administration may have defaulted to a knee-jerk support for Israel and enmity towards the Palestinians that will be bad for both Israel...