Kudos to Larry King

I've been pretty critical of Larry King in the past. While we were in Germany last summer, the Larry King reruns on CNN International were mostly embarrassing tabloid gossip -- Anna Nicole Smith type of stuff.

Tonight I'm channel surfing and Larry King has Serena Williams and Ashley Banfield on. Serena Williams describes how she felt when the Imus show referred to her as an animal when she was an 18 year old teenager. Ashley Banfield tells of Michael Savage calling her a slut on NBC, which she watched, in shock, live from her office at NBC. She went down the hall to complain to the former NBC president and was told, basically, to let it go. Very powerful stuff.

Wow. I can't believe I'm watching this on cable television.

I have to call this "The Imus Effect". Racism and sexism being discussed on national TV.

Racism Lives, USA, 2007

Shaquanda Cotton (from Free Shaquanda Cotton website)

Miami, Florida: Tennis player Serena Williams is racially abused by a white male spectator who tells her to "hit the ball into the net like any nigger would".

Paris, Texas: A 15-year-old black girl, Shaquanda Cotton, has been in jail for over a year of a seven year jail term for pushing a hall monitor at her high school in 2005. (The hall monitor was not injured; it was her first offense.) Three months earlier, the same judge sentenced a 14-year-old white girl convicted of arson for burning down her family's house to probation.

Georgia: The Georgia State Senate has dropped the bill that would have freed 19-year-old black man Genarlow Wilson, who will now rot in jail for another eight years for conduct that is now only a misdemeanor under Georgia law.

It's not just the South, either:

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Vaunted Harvard University has 41 varsity sports and not one black coach. This is not surprising given that the AD and his 13 senior administrators are also not black. The AD has hired coaches for 12 sports since he was hired in 2001; all his hires are white.