Final Word

In his welcome and inspiring maiden statement to the General Assembly, President Barack Obama correctly identified the challenges to our multilateral unity as “rooted in a discontent with the status quo.” We wholeheartedly endorse this assessment.

Those who say that “race is history” have it exactly backward — history is race. America, scrambled, after all, spells “I am race.” And America is race — from its symbolism to its substance, from its founding by slaveholders to its rending by civil war, from Johnnie Reb to Jim Crow, from the Ku Klux Klan to Katrina.

One doesn’t have to be a professional musician to have a deep connection to music. Music is everywhere. It is an inherent part of the human experience. Music is inside all of us with the rhythm of our heartbeats and the melodies we dream up in our own imaginations.

Despite years of effort, minority-owned businesses are still drastically underrepresented in the U.S. economy. Blacks made up 11.8 percent of the population and owned 5 percent of all privately held businesses, but Black-owned firms’ share of business receipts was a mere 1 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent figures, compiled in 2002.

This idea of neutrality is particularly hard to maintain in times such as these, when our society faces major unsolved problems. Indeed, we judges are frequently criticized these days for our neutrality.

Africa and its people are the most written about and the least understood of all the world’s people.