Dr. Martin Davidson is Associate Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business where he also serves as Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer. He blogs at Leveraging Difference.

Barack Obama still sneaks cigarettes. Gordon Brown has a mean temper. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin struggles with her weight. At what point do a leader's personal vices begin to undermine effectiveness? Is it better to hide them or acknowledge them?

The greatest misstep I see contemporary leaders make is trying to look flawless. There is a model of leadership out there that says that in order to be an effective leader, a person must appear to be more knowledgeable, more competent, more ethical, more poised, and more inspiring than the people she or he leads.

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from his formspring account http://formspring.me/jimiiizrael:

What do you think of the media's current focus on black women not being married?

I think it has reached a fever-pitch. I think the approach to the story/problem, to this point, has been counter-intuitive.

To wit:

If black men were as messed up as conventional wisdom (Essence Magazine) would have you believe, then they would not be attractive to any prospective partner. Yet, they manage to do ok in the marriage/dating pool. This idea that black women are loyal to the race and therefore only want to marry black men is ridiculous. It doesn't pass the smell test. There are ALOT of sisters w/white boys. So Obviously, they are a viable alternative. But even some white boys don't want to be bothered. Everyone, in fact, seems to fair better than black women in relationships --- why is this? I don't know, and I don't pretend to know.

The stats are interesting, but they don't tell us some important things. Like, this 42% of black women who won't/don't get married -- are they heterosexual? Do they even WANT to be married? And once you count out the women who don't like men, who are under-educated, who have multitple babies by multiple (3 or more) men, are the rest even marriageble? If these practical matters be the criteria, that is. This does not account for all the angry post-feminism black "feminists," who are only marginally eligible, if that. Gender, in and of itself, does not make you wife material. Once you weed through the numbers, you realize that the ratio of marriage black men to marriage black women? ABOUT EVEN.

I think there is something happening in the socialization of some, SOME black women that hobbles their marriageablity -- and I talk about that a bit in my book "The Denzel Principle." I don't have any answers, but I try to give you alot to think about.

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A gentleman referred me to his website, upon which there is an essay stating that "Avatar" triggered a sense of guilt about being white. Saw it as a condemnation of the military, and of corporations. Really? This gentleman needs to love himself more, accept himself more deeply. Criticizing behaviors, or writing cautionary tales about the excesses of a group or organization is not the same as condemning it.

But that is exactly how many people feel. And that is not mature behavior. Unfortunately, society doesn't really encourage us to be adults (which is an observation or criticism, not a condemnation of society. Sheesh.) I mean, if I tell Jason he's done something wrong, his poor little heart lurches to the conclusion that he must be a BAD BOY. This is one of the reasons that I will stand him in front of a mirror, have him look at himself and say "I like myself!"

This is horribly hard for him at first, but when he gets into it, there are joyous giggles. Oddly (not really) discipline and criticism are taken MUCH better for the rest of the day--I can point out a non-optimal behavior without him leaping to the conclusion that if he isn't the best boy in the world, he must be the worst.

And I think that a huge percentage of people live in such a binary world. If America isn't clearly the best on every issue, all the time...you must be saying America is AWFUL. If racial group X has abused its power, or segments of it are organized in patterns inefficient for producing stable social/family units...why, I must be CONDEMING it. They're the worst!

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When Attorney General Martha Coakley won the Massachusetts Democratic primary election for the seat held by the late Senator Ted Kennedy on December 8, 2009 by nineteen percentage points over Mike Capuano, her nearest rival, she and her supporters assumed the general election would be a cakewalk.  This is understandable because the combined tallies of Scott Brown and Jack Robinson, the only two Republicans running for the seat, didn’t equal the votes amassed by Mike Capuano.
 
After Scott Brown won the Republican primary, Martha Coakley and her strategists assumed that, in heavily Democratic Massachusetts where Ted Kennedy had held his seat for almost half a century, the general election was in the bag.  In fact, she became so low-key some thought she was bored with the campaign and cynically described the race as Brown vs. Bored.
 
An example of how little effort went into the Coakley campaign is found in the following statistics:  In the general election Scott Brown’s campaign went out and found 7.18 times more supporters than the 162,706 who voted for Republican candidates in primary while Martha Coakley’s campaign could only acquire 1.59 times as many as the 664,795 who voted for the four Democrats in the primary.
 
Given those statistics, is this a national trend or was it a case of Brown vs. Bored in Massachusetts--until it was too late?

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When we thought we had buried such offensive terms as mulatto, quadroon and octoroon and the skin-hue bigotry that spawned them, here comes the senior senator from Nevada.  In holding “light skin” and the absence of a “Negro dialect” as necessary qualifications for Senator Barack Obama to run successfully for president in 2008, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada offered up a rank insult to his colleague from Illinois.  Senator Reid has rightly apologized to President Obama, but doesn’t seem to have contemplated how hurtful his words might be to those millions of African Americans who are not “light-skinned.”  One wonders if he had seen the First Lady and her mother at the time of his remarks.

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Family stories passed from one generation to another are sometimes the only way that one generation of a family becomes real and tangible to succeeding generations. In our family, the prime storyteller was my grandfather. He would always respond to the request, "Tell me a story." To my child's mind, he told great stories, stories I in turn, many years later, told my children. Sometimes they listened , mostly they filed the information away into some mental file called "momma's stories." One day when my daughter was in sixth grade....."momma's stories" became real. She came flying in from school with a question.......

"Did my grandmother really shoot up a Ku Klux Klan meeting?"

"Where did you hear that?"

"From Liz (a kid on the next street whose family came from my home town in the Big Sandy Valley)."

"No, my mother did not shoot up a Klan meeting.."

"Liz's mother said her mother told her....."

"Her mother has the story a little mixed up but that's probably not her fault....

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By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: December 27, 2009

Percy E. Sutton, who displayed fierce intelligence and exquisite polish in becoming one of the nation’s most prominent black political and business leaders, died on Saturday, The Associated Press reported. He was 89.

Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David A. Paterson, confirmed Mr. Sutton’s death but said she did not know the cause, according to The A.P.

Mr. Sutton stood proudly at the center of the struggle for equal rights. He was arrested as a freedom rider; represented Malcolm X as young lawyer; rescued the fabled Apollo Theater in Harlem; and became a millionaire tycoon in the communications business to give public voice to African Americans.

He was also an eminent politician in New York City, rising from the Democratic clubhouses of Harlem to become the longest serving Manhattan borough president and, for more than a decade, the highest black official in the city. In 1977, he was the first seriously regarded black candidate for mayor.

His supporters saw his loss in that mayoral race as a stinging rebuff to his campaign’s strenuous efforts to build support among whites. But David N. Dinkins, who was elected the first black mayor in 1989, called Mr. Sutton’s failed bid indispensable to his own success.

“I stand on the shoulders of Percy Ellis Sutton,” Mr. Dinkins said in an interview.

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Fifty-seven years after its publication in 1952, it is safe to say that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is, in addition to being a luminous addition to our literary canon, a novel that has achieved that rare status of becoming an essential cultural artifact for understanding the American experience, much like the addresses of his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a college professor, I have read and taught this capacious work since the late 1960s. With each encounter over forty years, I am rewarded by the discovery of something new in Ellison’s text, for this is the kind of multi-layered literary and philosophical performance that we, as citizens concerned about the health of our republic, are obliged to re-read every ten or twenty years in order to check its insights and monitions against our cultural (and personal) progress and failures. As our understanding of liberty, equality, and this nation’s ideals grows and evolves, our experience of Invisible Man deepens, achieving ever greater subtlety, nuance, and prescience.

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  Sam Wilson: Revolution, It's the Only Solution 

home sick, lost my voice, excessive coughing. Anyway...

My co-teacher, the one who refuses to teach because the kids are to bad and she has to work on her masters degree. the one who is says it's okay to call black kids nigger when she is at home as long as she doesn't at school, I've been on her admin and dept. head to deal with her all semester. I get nothing from those crackers, they claim they will do something but they do nothing. I went to my dept. head and my admin (an ivy league educated black woman). They're helping. But the further I push things the more bad things I find. I now found out that she (co-teacher) has been flat refusing to enter my students (special ed) grades. Even when the work is done. She doesn't feel they are "worth" it since they are so bad and they are going to fail anyway. I'm not making this up.

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Through the kindness of friends in Scandinavia and intervention from on high, I received a personal invitation to the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony in the Oslo, Norway City Hall on December 10th and to the Nobel Peace Prize Concert on December 11th in the Oslo Spektrum.  In fact, I write you from Oslo where the Norwegian Nobel Committee will confer this most prestigious award upon President Barack Obama tomorrow.

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