The New York Times has a ‘Holiday Gift Guide’, with pages covering all kinds of things, from the “10 best books of 2009″ to “Holiday DVD’s” [sic] to ’smartphones’ from each of the major carriers in the U.S.

And then they have a page of gift ideas for colored people.

Oh, no, wait, pardon me. ‘Colored people’ is of course a euphemism from the 1800s that is now considered fairly offensive. The Times‘ gift guide is for ‘people of color’, which is somehow different even though the entire point of the phrase is to lump together people of drastically different histories and cultures and pretend that they’re the same thing. Because doing this is not, somehow, racist. Yeah, whatever.

What do ‘colored people’ like, according to the New York Times? Apparently:

• Children’s books about Barack Obama
• Children’s books about Sonya Sotomayor
• ‘Wise Latina’ t-shirts
• Gospel cruises
• Bindya scarves
• ‘Baby Jamz’, a ‘hip-hop and rhythm-based toy line’ that includes a ‘Mix Master Music Chair that allows children to be their own D.J.’s’ [sic] and a ‘Jammin’ Microphone’.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

And while scores at Hanna Woods [Elementary School] have improved over the last few years, the gains have not been good enough for the federal government. The [No Child Left Behind] law, enacted in 2002, requires states to set testing goals that get tougher every year. By 2014, every student in the nation, including the poor, minority and disabled, is expected to pass all tests.

You will note that the decidedly left-wing Post-Dispatch more or less equates being a ‘minority’ with being disabled or with being poor — and certainly with being too stupid to pass the tests. Every student — even black ones — will be expected to pass the tests: goodness! The Post does not say so directly, but the tone of the thing makes it clear that they believe that reading and basic arithmetic is pretty much beyond the abilities of most ‘minority’ students. Lovely outlook, that.

From the Washington Post, in an article about the ‘digital divide’ and how it’s harming schoolkids:

But even in Fairfax, the digital divide lives on in the study carrels of the Woodrow Wilson public library in the Falls Church area. Most afternoons, it is crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families using the computers.

It’s crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families. All those Indian anesthesiologists, Chinese engineers, Korean entrepreneurs, not buying computers for their kids even though they can afford it. Oh, wait, they do buy computers because they can afford it. Certainly many immigrants are relatively poor; but it’s interesting that the story equates being an immigrant and being poor. A better newspaper would have written that the libraries attract ’students from low-income families, many of them recent immigrants.’