This is highly illegal activity on the authorities part. This is begging the Supreme Court to strike this down. The lawmakers who voted this in need to be out of office.
Glenn Greenwald: Media moral standards
Tim Wise: Black Power's Gonna Get You Sucka: Right-Wing Paranoia and the Rhetoric of Modern Racism
"President Obama, the Black Panthers, and the Coming Racial Explosion" by Robert Morley:
Even some black leaders have spoken out against the Justice Department’s new racism-based policy. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder and president of bond Action, notes that any racism is wrong. “It wasn’t good when it happened to black people in the past way back when, and it’s not good to happen to white Americans today,” he says. “I just hope white Americans really wake up and realize that they are under attack because of their color.”
GLAAD is upset (and rightly so) with The View for this segment where the panelists and guest, comedian D. L. Hughley discussed AIDS in the black community:
Hughley: When you look at the prevalence of HIV in the African American Community, it's primarily young women who are getting it from men who are on the down low. That's the thing.
Shepherd: The down low is black men who've been going out. They are having sex with men and they're not telling their girlfriends or their wives that they're gay and their husbands, as well. And it's very prevalent with African American women because they come home and have sex with their wives or their girlfriends.
And they're not telling them that they're gay.
Shepherd: It's so big in the Black community with women because they're having unprotected sex with men who have been having sex with... with men.
While it's not true that closeted gay black men are the cause of HIV spreading among black women, I have yet to be convinced that "the down low" itself exists:
Using a content analysis of more than 170 articles written between 2001 and 2006, sociologist Richard N. Pitt, Jr. concluded that the media pathologized black bisexual men’s behavior while either ignoring or sympathizing with white bisexual men’s similar actions. He argued that the "Down Low" black bisexual is often described negatively as a duplicitous heterosexual man whose behaviors threaten the black community. Alternately, the "Brokeback" white bisexual (when seen as bisexual at all) is often described in pitying language as a victimized homosexual man who is forced into the closet by the heterosexist society around him.
My Google searches for "down low" myth invariably discussed AIDS, making me realize these two concepts are almost invariably linked in the public consciousness. The popularity of this "down low" myth is nothing more than a bigot two-fer: the blacks and the homosexuals, spreading deadly diseases.