Forgive me for getting personal, but this is a freakin' blog, right? I was fortunate enough to grow up in a nice, white, upper-middle-class Republican suburb of Chicago, but as far back as I can remember my politics tilted left. It probably had something to do with being raised by enlightened parents who never forced their kids to attend church, nor did they ever talk or act in any way racist or anti-Semitic or bigoted. (A fond memory of my childhood was my mother making breakfast on a Sunday morning with Soul Train blasting on the TV. "The Sooooouuuul Train!") But if forced to point to one thing, it might be the issue of race that predominantly shaped my politics. Driving with my mom into the city to get allergy shots on a weekly basis in the late 70s, I'd ponder the black ghetto we'd drive through often when taking a short cut.

This past week Henry Louis Gates wrote about how the Republican party lost the black vote:

the moment when the Republican Party lost black America can be given a date: Oct. 26, 1960. Martin Luther King Jr., arrested in Georgia during a sit-in, had been transferred to a maximum-security prison and sentenced to four months on the chain gang, without bail. As The Times reported, John F. Kennedy called Coretta King, expressing his concern. Richard Nixon didn't.

Gates mentions that his colleague Michael Dawson places it at a later date

The real watershed, in his view, was the 1980 election. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford tried to build up, and win over, a black middle class; the Reagan team figured they could do better by shutting out the black political establishment and mobilizing white conservatives. "Black elites were shocked to find out that with Reagan and his advisers, there were no longer 'good Negroes' and 'bad Negroes,'" Dawson says.

It's not apparent to me that the Democrats have served blacks well, either. Particularly egregious was Clinton's support for the "War on Drugs." Jesse Walker has an inteview with David Simon, the creator of HBO's stellar show The Wire, which just started its third season last night.