Earl Ofari Hutchinson

In her NBC interview, Octuplet mom Nadya Suleman was irked at getting pounded for being a single mother with 14 kids. Or, in her words, "It's not as controversial because they're couples so it’s more acceptable." She had good reason to be irked, but she should be irked at herself, too, for doing much to reinforce that stigma.

President Barack Obama lists “Civil Rights” as the first item under his “Agenda” on his whitehouse.gov White House website. Please see http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/civil_rights/

He pledges to end gender- and race-based pay disparities, push through the Fair Pay and Employment Non-Discrimination Acts, harshly penalize voter fraud, outlaw racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies, provide financial incentives to local and state police to ban racial profiling, and to dump the race- tinged drug sentencing disparities.

A recent CNN poll seems to confirm what a majority of African-Americans and a significant percent of whites seem to think or at least say. And that is that President Obama will have to be better because he’s black.

The unchallenged article of faith is that the election of President Barack Obama fulfills Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that the content of character should trump skin color. King uttered the words in his March on Washington speech in 1963.

We heard that said time and again in the march up to the King national holiday last Monday and Obama’s inauguration yesterday.

There’s a good chance that former Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle will be charged in the videotaped New Year’s Day killing of Oscar Grant, a young African-American. But charging Mehserle with the fatal shooting of Grant and getting a conviction is a far different matter.

The smile on Eartha Kitt’s face was unforgettable. It belied the pain, ridicule and turmoil that she had endured after she was unceremoniously shoved at or near the top of then-President Lyndon Johnson’s enemies list.

Here’s the “What is President-elect Barack Obama, black, bi-racial or multi-racial?” quiz.

If he did not have one of the world’s most recognizable names and faces, he would fume at being subjected to poor (or no) service in restaurants, bypassed by taxis, racially-profiled by police on street corner stops, or by landlords who refuse to show him an apartment, followed in stores by security guards, denied a loan for his business or home-purchase due to red-lining, find himself living in a re-segregated neighborhood, or routinely passed over for a corporate management position.

Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. should bow out of contention for Obama’s Senate seat. True there is yet no evidence that he offered to grease Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s palm in return for the seat. But there’s a continuing probe into whether a Jackson family member or associates acted as Jackson’s paymasters to Blagojevich.

The much-deserved defeat of scandal- plagued Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson by Vietnamese-American immigration attorney Anh (Joseph) Cao was not about race.

At first glance it defied credulity that the staid, respected Chicago Tribune would do something as screwball as giving any credence to the issue of whether President-elect Barack Obama is really a U.S. citizen or not.

But the Tribune will run not one but two big splashy ads paid for by a quasi libertarian outfit named www.wethepeoplefoundation.org based in Queensbury, N.Y. The group demands that Obama produce his original birth certificate with all the official markings and proper affixed signatures on it.