Here's a litmus test for Barack Obama: where does he stand on racial preferences? If he's for them, then how can he claim to be a national unifier? What country bases its rule of social justice on attempting to figure out whose ancestors did what to whom?

A generation ago, racial preferences were arguably necessary for African Americans, especially in the South, to kick in the closed door of segregation and Jim Crow. But then other groups (women, Hispanics, immigrants, gays) climbed aboard the affirmative action bandwagon, absurdly proclaiming, "We are the new blacks." To which the answer is: are you the descendants of slaves? Can you begin to show a comparable history of suffering and deprivation as African Americans?

Today preferences based on race, gender, national origin and sexual orientation have largely become a scam. In elite colleges, for instance, they are a way for Jesse Jackson's kids to get an unfair advantage over poor white kids with better grades and better test scores. On those same campuses, women with lesser qualifications especially in the sciences are routinely hired as teachers over men who are more deserving. What could be more divisive, and more infuriating, then such policies of official race and gender-based discrimination?

Obama can launch a national debate, and give substance to his pledge to be a uniter, by saying: It's time for America to become a post-racial society. This doesn't mean that racism has ended or that as a social reality "race doesn't matter." But the character and magnitude or racism have dramatically changed. Racism today does not have legal sanction, as it once did. Equally significant, racism today is episodic rather than systematic. This means that the law no longer has to take account of race in order to get beyond race. The best way to get rid of race as a factor in decision-making is quite simply to get rid of race as a factor in decision-making. If racial preferences fall, obviously gender preferences would disappear as well.

If Obama makes this argument, it would astound the country and immediately draw moderate and even Republican support. The Hillary camp would launch its usual attacks, but against Obama they would bounce off. This is one issue on which Obama would have unimpeachable credibility.

Will he do it? Does he have the guts?

Rigoberta Menchu is probably the most famous Guatemalan of Mayan ancestry, having won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992. While the wacky Scandinavians commended her as a representative voice of the native Indian people, just how "representative" Rigoberta Menchu is can be discerned from the results of Guatemala's presidential election. The results, released on Monday, show that Menchu came in sixth in a field of 14 with just 3 percent of the vote.

Who is Rigoberta Menchu? I first encountered her name in the Stanford multicultural curriculum while I was researching my first book Illiberal Education. Interestingly one Stanford professor described Rigoberta as a "quadruple victim" of oppression. That's right, a quadruple victim. She was a person of color and a victim of racism, a woman and a victim of sexism, a South Central American (thank you, commenters) and a victim of North American colonialism, and a Mayan of Indian descent and hence oppressed by the light-skinned ruling class of Guatemala. Rigoberta's harrowing tale of victim hood is eloquently told in her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu.

Elizabeth Edwards is not afraid to speak her mind. And now she's catching flak for a controversial quote in a recent article about the way in which the Web is dominating the 2008 campaign:

The Web can be liberating. "It's about bypassing the sieve of the mainstream media," says Elizabeth Edwards, wife and confidant of Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards. "The idea that you have people standing between you and the voter is diminished, and the capacity to speak directly empowers candidates to trust their own voices." With Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hogging media coverage, campaigns can push their messages without paying for ads.

"In some ways, it's the way we have to go," Edwards says. "We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman. Those things get you a lot of press, worth a certain amount of fundraising dollars. Now it's nice to get on the news, but not the be all and end all."

Christopher Hitchens thinks he is being very brave in attacking Islam. So do a lot of other Americans on the right and the on the left. They call the prophet Muhammad a terrorist, the Koran a gospel of violence, and Islam a religion for losers and murderers. Since there is an understandable fear and hostility toward Islamic terrorism in the wake of 9/11, Muslim-bashing has found a big constituency and has now become a very profitable career. Where is the bravery today in denouncing Islam?

Ward Churchill is hopping mad that he's being fired from his tenured faculty position at the University of Colorado. He says he is not leaving. He has announced his decision to sue. The whole procedure, he insists, was a "farce" and a "fraud." Only in America, he believes, could he be treated in this way. I'm not sure why Churchill is so indignant. According to the logic of his original argument, he deserves his penalty--and worse. By his own account, he had it coming.

Let's review the main thesis of Churchill's notorious essay On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. He called the civilians working on September 11, 2001 in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center "little Eichmanns." In short, they were "a cadre of faceless bureaucrats and technical experts who had willingly and profitably harnessed themselves to the task of making America's genocidal world order hum with maximal efficiency." So they deserved it. Indeed we all deserve it. Churchill wrote that for U.S. crimes stretching back two centuries, compensatory justice "would require a lethal reduction in the U.S. population...of between 96 and 99 percent." Basically no one in America deserves to live.

American colleges seems to be systematically discriminating in favor of men and against women, and women seem to be cheering them on. Strange? Well, the reason for the discrimination is that the male-female ratio is approaching 40:60. That means that colleges are facing the scary prospect of having only 40 men for every 60 women. The men aren't complaining: even very ordinary guys now have a good chance of dating the attractive gals. But the women aren't happy at all. The Chronicle of Higher Education observes in its July 20 issue that "women are expected to fulfill a guy's sexual desire immediately or risk losing a prospective mate to the next girl in line."

So what are the colleges doing? The Chronicle reports that several colleges, both private and public, are making it easier for boys to get in, even though girls apply with comparable or better grades and standardized test scores. At William and Mary and the University of Richmond, for example, the acceptance rate for boys is around 13 percent higher than that for girls with matching credentials. The most surprising aspect of this gender discrimination is that no one seems to be objecting to it.

I won't tell you to whom I'm referring unless you give me permission to use the word. I'll just say that I was watching the Sunday morning talk shows and after one politician said his piece, I suddenly thought: "Wow. He's a cracker."

I rushed to my computer to talk about why I think he's a "cracker." But then I thought: "Uh oh, are people going to be offended? Is this going to provoke some online kerfuffle? Some cyber hullabaloo? Well, I don't need that kind of grief!"

Cracker, of course, has several definitions:

• a thin crisp wafer made of flour and water with or without leavening or shortening; unsweetened or semi-sweet
• a person who breaks security on a computer system; a cyber hacker
  
• a firecracker: firework consisting of a small explosive charge and fuse in a heavy paper casing
• an American alternative rock band fronted by Camper Van Beethoven singer David Lowery

But I also believe it's a mean rednecky white guy, right?

I guess I just need to know if it's really offensive. I don't want this blog to be P.C., that's for sure. But I'll refrain from using the term if a clear majority would prefer I not use it.

So weigh in now: Do you mind if I use the word "Cracker" to describe a certain politician in my next posting?

We are in an age of self-esteem, which is why only firstborns should read this article. It reports on new research that has found that the oldest child tends to be the smartest one in the family. Years ago psychologist Frank Sulloway published a book on this politically incorrect subject, and the latest studies corroborate his research.

A gaffe, the columnist Michael Kinsley once noted, is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Japan's defense minister committed a huge gaffe recently and was forced to resign. Speaking at a university near Tokyo, Fumio Kyuma remarked that the U.S. dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war "and I think that it couldn't be helped."

The reaction brought savage denunciation from groups in Japan that claim to represent the families of bomb victims. Nobuo Miyake, director of one such group, indignantly said that "the U.S. justifies the bombings saying they saved American lives. It's outrageous for a Japanese politician to voice such thinking. Japan is a victim."

Actually, Japan started it with the attack on Pearl Harbor. So merciless was the Japanese war machine that there were virtually no American prisoners of war taken on the Pacific front. Even the Nazis held many Amerians as prisoners, while the Japanese basically killed all their captives. To say that "Japan is a victim" is as absurd as saying that "Germany is a victim" of World War II.

"This fourth of July," declared the great black leader Frederick Douglass, "is yours, not mine.You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, is inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. I have no patriotism. I have no country."

On the eve of America's independence day, I'd like to dispel a politically correct myth about the American founders: that they regarded blacks as three-fifths of human beings. Even so eminent an historian as John Hope Franklin charged the American founders with "degrading the human spirit by equating five black men with three white men."

As I show in my book What's So Great About America, the origins of the clause are to be found in the debate between the northern states and the southern states over the issue of political representation. The South wanted to count blacks as whole persons, in order to increase its political power. The North wanted blacks to count for nothing--not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the anti-slavery majority in Congress.

Cameron Diaz's penchant for dictator-inspired fashion is well known. With all the brouhaha over her Mao Zedong handbag, barely anyone noticed her Nicolae Ceausescu fanny pack. And it doesn't end there...

It is part of the perversion of the human psyche that miseries, recollected at a later time, become precious and one even begins to feel nostalgic for them. When you are sitting around with friends, you are likely to recall the time all of you were stranded in the snow, or stuck in a ditch, and the worse things were in the actual situation, the pleasanter the retelling of the stories becomes. "We nearly froze to death that time. Wasn't it great!"

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports in its June 15, 2007 issue that a weird kind of Communist chic has spread throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. People are collecting paraphernalia from the days of the cold war, such as old coins, and cars that barely ran, and photographs of the Soviets displaying heavy missiles on the streets of Moscow. Poets and writers are asking whether things are really better since the Berlin Wall came down. Until now such outlandish theories were restricted to some professors of romance languages at Berkeley and a handful of other Western universities.

Is philosophy Richard Rorty really dead? He claims to be, and the New York Times wrote an obituary yesterday. But Rorty was the supreme champion of irony, and I wonder if he's putting us on.

But hey, you might say, there is Rorty's body lying in the morgue. True, but let's remember that Rorty was a kind of nihilist. His most famous book was Philosophy and the Mirrror of Nature. Rorty's point was that for centuries human beings have dogmatically assumed that our senses and our reason give us access to the world "out there." In reality, the only truths are the ones we construct for ourselves, the truths that work for us.

So is it convenient for us to believe that Rorty is dead? I met Rorty once, about 15 years ago when I spoke at the University of Virginia on my then-new book Illiberal Education. Rorty struck me as an effete snob, and this came through in his writings. He was always contrasting the rude opinions of the people with what enlightened people like himself thought about the matter. In some cases his whole argument came down to a kind of elitist self-congratulation. The man really knew how to snicker.