I love the blog “Stuff White People Like.” The site promotes itself as a “tongue-in-cheek comprehensive list of everything left-wing, upper-middle-class Caucasians enjoy.” The list is pretty accurate based on what I know of my White liberal friends, they love listening to Black music that Black people don’t listen to anymore (No. 116), publicly screaming about how they hate their parents (No. 17) and of course Facework (No. 106). Recently, Christian Lander, the blog’s creator, was being interviewed on “Lopez Tonight” and joked about how in his mind Obama is a “White liberal” president. The reason? Obama has the one accessory that all White liberals want—cute Black children. I couldn’t help but think of this last week when Sandra Bullock was on the cover of People Magazine with her newly adopted Black baby boy, Louis. It’s nice to see another White celebrity get exactly what they like, and not have to answer any tough questions about it.

(NNPA)—Arizona Senate Bill 1070 gives law enforcement officers the right to stop, question, arrest and detain any person they suspect is in the United States illegally. What gives rise to such suspicion? Give the climate and the content in which the law has been passed, it might well be called the “detain suspected Mexicans” legislation.

Few of us should get comfortable, though, thinking the legislation targets Mexican Americans and not others. Giving law enforcement the right to stop based on suspicion is a license to harass folks who are “other,” and that may include African-Americans and other brown people. It isn’t likely that White folks are likely to be stopped, though perhaps they ought to be.

(NNPA)—Like everyone else who read professor Skip Gates’ piece in the New York Times asserting that Africans were just as responsible for slavery as Europeans, I was aghast because he is one of the most acclaimed scholars in the country and his position lends credibility to those who oppose an historical corrective for the oppression of African peoples.

Admittedly, my concern also arises from the publication of my most recent book on reparations, “The Price of Racial Reconciliation,” in which I take a strong position favoring reparations as a long-time member of this movement. Although Gates’ argument is cast in scholarly terms, it should be said that he is not a recognized scholar of African history, a fact that has caused him to design a simple equation of the culpability of Africans with Europeans in the slave trade. This cannot be so, even if it is his point that Africans were surely involved in the slave trade.

My position on illegal immigration is very public—I do not support amnesty under any circumstances. So, with the new illegal immigration bill signed into law in Arizona and the volume of phone calls seeking my opinion, I have decided to share my thoughts on this issue.

But this time, I want to try a different approach. Those who are interested in my detailed views on illegal immigration can go to my website and read some of my previous columns of this subject. In this column, I will pose a series of questions and make some observations that will, hopefully stimulate a more reasoned debate on this issue.