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My son’s half-Asian — his mom is Thai — and he feels like he’s missing out on an important Asian tradition.

“On Chinese New Year,” he says, “Chinese kids get wads of cash. Koreans have a holiday where kids go to relatives’ houses, bow to people and get wads of cash.”

He mentions a Korean friend of his who raked in 180 bucks the last time this holiday rolled around.

“Why isn’t there a Thai holiday where kids bow to people and get wads of cash?” he asks.

“Isn’t that how pretty much every day goes for you?” I ask. “Without the bowing, I mean. Handing you wads of cash though — that part is in full effect.”

This is how “diversity” works in practice: Intellectual contention is drowned out in a sea of emotion, much of it phony. Members of designated victim groups respond to a serious argument with “pain” and “shock” and accusations of “hate,” and university administrators make a show of pretending to care.

— Best of the Web Today

It is bizarre that liberals who celebrate the unruly demonstrations of our youth would malign or impugn the motivation of today’s protestors with opposing views.

The mainstream media’s failure to honestly cover last month’s mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. was a disgrace. The focus on anti-Obama placards (which were no worse than the rabid anti-LBJ, anti-Reagan or anti-Bush placards of leftist protests), combined with the grotesque attempt to equate criticism of Obama with racism, simply illustrated why the old guard TV networks and major urban daily newspapers are slowly dying. Only a simpleton would believe what they say.

— Camille Paglia

I think it’s important to realize that I was actually black before the election.

— Barack Obama

Researchers have found that generic American parents, faced with a child who can’t do math or science, will say “Don’t worry, Johnny, because you have so many other talents.” Asian parents, supposedly, will say “Since you aren’t apparently naturally gifted at math or science you’ll have to study extra hard in these areas,” and not stop nagging until the kid is doing well.

— Philip Greenspun

It took less than a day for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates to become racial lore. When one of America’s most prominent black intellectuals winds up in handcuffs, it’s not just another episode of profiling — it’s a signpost on the nation’s bumpy road to equality.

If this man can be taken away by police officers from the porch of his own home, what does it say about the treatment that average blacks can expect in 2009?

— Jesse Washington, AP National Writer

[In Jim Mora voice]: Profiling??? You kidding me? PRO-filing?!??!

“Profiling” implies an absence of facts or evidence. It means “I’m targeting you for suspicion simply because you’re black and therefore more likely to be engaged in criminal activity.”

That’s not what happened here.

A police officer responded to a 911 call reporting two black males breaking into a house. When he arrived, he found a black man in the house. You don’t have to be Dick Tracy to identify the man as a potential suspect.

Police pulling over black drivers just because they’re black? That would be profiling. But why do they pull over white drivers? Why do they keep pulling me over?

What’s the theory on this — white drivers get pulled over for cause and black drivers get pulled over just because they’re black? Black drivers never commit a traffic infraction?

The 58-year-old professor had returned from a trip to China last Thursday afternoon and found the front door of his Cambridge, Mass., home stuck shut. Gates entered the back door, forced open the front door with help from a car service driver, and was on the phone with the Harvard leasing company when a white police sergeant arrived.

Gates and the sergeant gave differing accounts of what happened next.

No they didn’t. Gates was uncooperative and he was arrested. Everyone agrees on that.

But for many people, that doesn’t matter. All they see is pure, naked racial profiling.

“Many people”? How many? And why wouldn’t it matter? Because a white cop can’t be trusted? I’m seeing racial profiling here, but not on the part of the cops.

Here’s Gates on his porch in a photo taken by one of his neighbors. He’s yelling something at a black officer, who’s ignoring him, while two white officers trying to calm him down.

What’s your badge number? You don’t know who you’re messing with! I’ll make a documentary about this!

I know lots of people who’ve had unpleasant run-ins with cops over the years, including arrests and beatings, but not because they’re black. In fact, all of them are white. The common denominator is that, like Gates, they all have attitude problems.

Cops have to deal with the situations that nobody else wants to deal with. They’re the agency of last resort. I’ve only called in the police twice in my life — once when the guy next door was shooting off a rifle in his driveway in the middle of the night, and once when a person went berserk in my home. Everything else I felt like I could handle myself.

I’ll tell you right now, if your neighbor is shooting off a rifle or someone’s going nuts at your house, don’t call me because I’m not coming over. Call the police.

I have no problem being deferential to cops. It makes sense to me that when your job is dealing with volatile, high-risk situations, you want to establish control and you don’t want to put up with a lot of nonsense.

I wonder how Gates would handle a similar situation. Probably the exact same way. Let’s say he’s teaching a class and one of the students is a disruptive wiseass. How long is he going to put up with that — the whole semester? My guess is he’s going to shut it down pretty quickly. Nobody likes a wiseass interfering with his ability to do his job.

President Obama weighs in: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry.”

Really? Why? I wouldn’t be angry. I’d be glad that someone was willing to stop by and investigate a report that someone was breaking into my house.

And when they got there and found someone in the house, I’d like them to check that person out thoroughly, even if it turns out to be me.

“It’s okay, officer,” I’d say. “It’s my house.” Of course, an intruder might say the same thing. What’s the cop supposed to do? Turn around and go back to the station? It’s all right, the guy said it was his house. No — get the guy out of the house and figure out who he is, even if it’s me.

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

— Judge Sonia Sotomayor

President Obama has said he wanted justices with “empathy,” although in fairness he has also insisted that knowledge of the law would not disqualify a prospective nominee.

— Best of the Web Today

I’m driving my son to hockey practice . . . at Barranca and Culver, an Asian kid is holding a sign with an arrow and something written in Chinese. Or Korean maybe.

“Wow,” I say, “that is racist. I’m being totally excluded from the activity, whatever it is. If he had a sign saying ‘No Whites Allowed,’ it couldn’t be any more racist.”

“Maybe that’s what it says,” my son suggests.

“Good point.”

My son’s one-eighth Japanese on his mom’s side and the student body at his school is about 40 percent Korean, so when he comes into my room yelling, “YES! I am going to shove it” — punctuated with a fist pump — “at those Koreans tomorrow,” it doesn’t take long to figure out that Japan must have won the World Baseball Classic . . .

“Forty percent of the people at my school speak Korean,” my son says. “Or Chinese. I can’t tell the difference.”

I went to get my hair cut at lunch. There was one guy waiting ahead of me and two stylists — a woman, and a gay Mexican guy with a Mohawk.

Am I a bad person for praying that Mohawk would finish first (he did) and take the other guy?

My son says when he was in Washington, D.C., he saw shops where all the hair cutters were men.

“That’s different,” I explain. “Those are barbers. Barbers don’t mess around with you like stylists. I don’t want a gay guy with a Mohawk running his fingers through my hair. Note the fact that he’s a Mexican doesn’t matter at all. I mean, I’m not a racist or anything.”

My son needs an African-American name for a character he created in NFL Street.

“How about Kareem of Wheat?” I suggest.

He decides to go with Delondre McWreck . . .

My son and I went to the Lakers game last night, a pre-season game against Utah . . .

Pre-game

As we were walking in, he pointed out an Asian girl with a spiky-haired Asian guy wearing an Olympics jersey and said, “That guy with the Olympic jersey pulled a hotter Asian woman than you.”

The girl was hotter than my wife is now, but not hotter than she was at that age.

“You don’t know anything,” I said. “Mom was pretty hot.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Game

Pretty good game! The starters played more than I thought they would.

Andrew Bynum is back. He looked good!

Jerry Buss was there. He looked terrible. Thirty minutes before the game, a guy rolled him out in a wheelchair to the end of the court. It took him several minutes to hobble from there to his courtside seat. My son said he had a leg injury. I thought he was just too old.

The girl sitting next to him — his date or his great-granddaughter, I’m not sure which — looked really good.

The Laker Girls totally set the bar for whatever you call these kinds of groups — cheerleaders? Dance teams?

I realized that what’s missing from my workplace is hot girls in extremely short skirts who jump around and cheer whenever something noteworthy happens.

We check in a bug fix? Gooooo team!

Then at halftime — or “lunch” as we call it — they’d change into tight pants and belly shirts and jump around in the new outfits all afternoon.

Good times!

Post-game

On the drive home, my wife called my son’s cell phone. The conversation was focused on exactly where we were and how long it would take us to get home.

“Why does she care about that?” I asked.

“She’s probably up to something and wants to make sure she stops doing it before we get there.”

My son had an assignment this weekend to write an essay on cultural values vs. personal values in Huckleberry Finn.

The teacher didn’t assign the whole book, just an excerpt in which Huck has to decide whether or not to send Jim, the escaped slave, back to Miss Watson.

So I read through the excerpt and sure enough, it includes multiple uses of what’s now known as “the N-word.”

I asked the boy, “Did Mr. Murano discuss with you guys about Mark Twain’s use of the word ‘nigger’?”

“No,” he said. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, our school is mostly Asian. Now if Mark Twain had overused the word ‘chink,’ then we’d have a problem.”

My son’s a mixed kid — white and Asian . . .

Last night, he said, “I should marry a black and Mexican girl. Our kids would be a mix of all races: white, Asian, Mexican and black. Those kids would be good at everything.”

A new set of California Academic Performance Index (API) scores are out . . .

In Irvine, where I live, education is king, and the school district posted a very nice score: 888 out of 1000.

Breaking it down demographically, the Asian kids led the way with a 933. African-American and Hispanic kids were both more than 100 points below the average, but there are so few of them in the district that they don’t affect the overall score very much.

Even the special ed kids scored a respectable 705, higher than the 668 scored by the neighboring Santa Ana district, where education takes a back seat to gang-related slayings.

Irvine: Our special ed kids are smarter than your honor students.

A co-worker informs me that a Santa Ana elementary school teacher has been charged with child endangerment for keeping a gun in her classroom.

“Well, that’s Santa Ana,” I say. “What do you expect from people? Not a day goes by that you can’t pick up the Orange County Register and read about a gang-related slaying in Santa Ana. If I were a teacher in Santa Ana, you best believe I’d be packing heat too. Thank god this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Irvine where I live.”

“There are Asian gangs in Irvine.”

“Asian gangs in Irvine?! What a racist you are. I’ve lived in Irvine for seven years and I’ve never seen or heard of any Asian gang activity. Unless studying for AP exams counts as a gang activity. Blowing their brains out with mathematical formulas . . .”

My son put on a cap, a pair of sunglasses, hung a clock around his neck, and went trick-or-treating with his friends as Flavor Flav.

I can’t imagine anyone in Irvine is going to be able to figure that one out.

Postscript

“One woman asked me, ‘Are you supposed to be Flavor Flav?’” he says.

“What was her ethnicity?” I ask him.

“White.”

OK, I stand corrected.

My son and I are watching a Citibank commercial in which a woman in Japan drops her son off for his first day of school.

As his mom starts to walk away, the boy looks back anxiously . . .

“What’s the Asian kid nervous about?” my son says. “He’s going to get better grades than the rest of the kids anyway. Oh wait, all the other kids are Asian too. Ouch.”

From an American Cancer Society email:

While minorities have made great social strides in the United States in recent decades, many still experience disproportionately higher incidences of disease — especially cancer. The American Cancer Society is working to eliminate cancer disparities among minority populations and the medically underserved, a fact underscored by National Multicultural Cancer Awareness Week, which is April 15-21, 2007.

Sounds like more white people need to get cancer . . .