• Dissecting a public figure’s classic “apology” for saying something racist. [RR]

• Birdman thinks Lil Wayne is greater than Tupac, Biggie and Jay-Z. []

• White supremacists plan a rally in Jena on Martin Luther King day. How innovative! [SPLC]

• Mekhi Phifer spawns. []

Halloween is supposed to be a holiday for the kids, who get to dress up like their favorite Disney characters and troll the neighborhood for sweets. But a lot of adults consider Halloween as a chance to expose the side of you that you keep hidden the other 364 days of the year. Most women use Halloween as an excuse to dress like a total slut and get away with it. But for the completely ignorant and/or racist, Halloween is blackface time. Every year, in the days following Halloween, some frat boy at some college gets in trouble for impersonating a black person. And they never learn!

So I put together a little poll to see what you guys think will be the most popular costume among the blackface set. O.J. Simpson’s an old favorite that I’m sure will be resurrected after his recent legal snafu. The Michael Vick craze has already begun. Jay-Z and Beyonce are the perfect costumes for the most popular couple in school. Plus, if the girl is blond, she doesn’t even have to wear a wig. And the Jena Six and Rutgers basketball team? Those two are only for the truly daring. But I’m sure America’s privileged college boys are up for the challenge.

Minorities will be less likely to trick or treat this year, according to a new survey.

The survey found that 73 percent of whites versus 56 percent of minorities said their children will trick-or-treat on Wednesday.

That disparity in the survey is similar to the difference in how people view the safety of their neighborhoods, according to the poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos. Lower-income people and minorities are more likely to worry that it might not be safe to send their children out on Halloween night.

Although it seems like mostly the white kids will be getting candy, I know that a lot of schools and community centers hold Halloween parties to provide a safe environment (and candy) for kids. Plus, it’s my understanding that even parents who live in the safest of neighborhoods aren’t really into the traditional trick-or-treat thing anymore because of safety concerns. Is it slowly becoming obsolete?

This holiday season, the theaters will be showing not one, but two Christmas movies with all-black casts. No, they’re not Tyler Perry productions. No, they don’t look particularly wonderful, but they are nice family films filled with brown faces. An alternative to American Gangster for the kiddies, if you will.

Check out the trailer for The Perfect Holiday, starring Gabrielle Union opposite Morris Chestnut (an age-appropriate love-interest), above.

The Chris Brown, Regina King, and Idris Elba (!) movie This Christmas will also be in theaters next month.

This post has put me in a very premature Christmas-y mood. Great, now I’ll be humming Donny Hathaway for the rest of the day.

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The annual West Indian American Day Parade is a huge event in Brooklyn, where I live, and, looking at the photos of all the colorful revelry, I’m sad I missed it. Instead I spent some time with my dear friend in Atlanta, where, at Opera on Sunday night, I had the distinctly interesting experience of standing in close proximity to the (not very tall) person I had written my weekly open letter to the day before. Had I been in a normal state of mind (i.e. had the Grey Goose not had your girl feeling a little too loose for a serious conversation about gender/racial politics), I might have introduced myself and sent Polow here. As it was, he was surrounded by a bevy of women, black ones, believe it or not, who had apparently been deemed submissive enough to share his company.

Also seen (by me) at Opera: A bunch of ATL regulars, Ludacris, and Ne-Yo, who developed an undeniably sour expression on his face when the DJ played a Bobby Valentino song right after his. Could he still be annoyed about this?

After the jump check out more pretty pictures from Labor Day in Brooklyn, since I didn’t have a camera to record my Labor Day in ATL. Hope you had a great three-day weekend, too!

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