Your Monday Random-Ass Roundup: Black Monday.

Black people are off to a rough start this week.

As you’ll read in the links to come, Don Lemon offhandedly suggested that black people excel at homophobia – as opposed to math or generosity or pole vaulting, a leading GOP presidential candidate casually floated the idea of resurrecting literacy tests for voters, and science (empirical data!) has objectively proven that our women are ugly.

Now the latest: noted friend of “the blacks,” Donald Trump, announced today that he will not run for president.

Really, only Frankie Beverly and Maze can save the Negroes now.

If Barack Obama didn’t happen to be “the most successful food stamp president in history,” we, as a people, really would have nothing to believe in anymore.

Now for links:

1. International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was removed from a Paris-bound flight Saturday afternoon and arrested after allegedly sexually assaulting a hotel maid.  His arrest has thrown the talks over Greece’s debt crisis into disarray, as well as upending the French presidential race.  Strauss-Kahn was the Socialist party’s favored candidate and had a good shot at beating president Nicholas Sarkozy.  Sadly, this does not appear to be the first time Strauss-Kahn has assaulted someone. (Nicole)

2. Rahm Emanuel takes over as mayor of the Chi today, and he’s got some big dilemmas on his plate. “If the president raises your taxes, you don’t leave the country. If a governor does same, you likely don’t split the state. But if a mayor exacts the pain, folks will mull running to the suburbs, partly explaining why the latest census figures show a population loss of 200,000 for Chicago…The instant accountability partly explains the difficulty of being mayor — whether the issue is citizens infuriated at rising costs, cops being shot, armies of kids dropping out of school or potholes not being fixed and snow not plowed. Add a sharply-declining revenue base, awful poverty and segregation and mediocre schools and you can understand why it’s easier being, say, a journalist opining about a big city mayor.” (Meanwhile Richard Daley, who held down the mayor’s post for two decades, has to try to remember how to drive a car.) (G.D.)

3. The cover of WaPo this Sunday was a great investigation into the waste and general disorganization that plagues the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s affordable housing programs. (Nicole)

4. More about housing: The Chicago Reporter found that a number of financial institutions aren’t registering their vacant properties in the city, causing taxpayers to lose out on millions in revenue from fees but also shoulder the cost to secure the properties. (Blackink)

5. The horrors of the Rwandan genocide are being recounted in a Topeka, Kansas, federal courtroom in the trial of Lazare Kobagaya, who is accused of inciting deadly violence against Tutsis in a small village. He’s not accused of genocide, but with lying to U.S. officials about his role in the massacre there in order to gain American citizenship.  (G.D.)

6. Psychological douchebag Satoshi Kanazawa provides an “objective” measure of what makes black women less attractive than other women. It comes from his thesis, “How I Will Pretend to Use Science to Justify my Prejudices.” If that weren’t proof enough that Kanazawa is a terrible person, this is the same guy who wrote “Why Modern Feminism is Illogical, Unnecessary and Evil.” It’s based on the illogical assumption that men and women are identical save for societal influences, women are better off than men on the things that matter, and it makes us unhappy, he says. Seems like I’ve read this before. (Monica)

7. CBS recently highlighted the emerging “sovereign citizen” movement, which consists of about 300,000 people that the FBI considers among the nation’s top domestic terror threats. Among them – or not, depending on who you believe – was a former Sarasota policeman who lost his job because of his affiliation with the group.  (Blackink)

8. Don’t get worried or anything, but the 21st century will be “the century of disasters.” Slate’s Joel Achenbach: “Natural disasters will increasingly be accompanied by technological crises—and the other way around.” (Blackink)

9. Hundreds of African youths are turning to porn to escape poverty. But few are aware of the risks – human trafficking and increased exposure to STDs – that come with the career change. (Blackink)

10. From Crunk Feminist Collective: It Gets Wetter: A Message to Women Who Frequently Have Horrible, Rushed Sex. (G.D.)

11. CNN’s Don Lemon reveals that he is gay in his forthcoming book about his career. “Mr. Lemon has not made a secret of his sexual orientation in his work life; many of his CNN co-workers and managers have long been aware that he is gay. But he still acknowledged that going public in his book carries certain risks.  ‘I’m scared,’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘I’m talking about something that people might shun me for, ostracize me for.'” (G.D.)

12. In the spirit of spring cleaning, the Washington Post asked ten writers to name things we should toss.  blackink12 will be happy to know tipping is among them. (Nicole)

13. Speaking of Don Lemon, Phoenix Suns president Rick Welts has also come out.  I’m glad he did, but I look forward to the day when this is not a newsworthy story, in the NBA or anywhere else. (Nicole)

14. Black people fast: Bill Lester became the first black driver to win a Grand-Am Road Racing event over the weekend. That right there is that history. (G.D.)

15. Maybe, Robert Lipsyte says, an NFL lockout would be good for America. (Blackink)

Of course, without football, we should expect another surge in the black unemployment rate.

Because when you think about it, all news is bad for black people. Especially today.

Joel

Joel Anderson —blackink —  writes about sports, politics, crime, courts, and other issues far beyond his competence at BuzzFeed. He has worked at media outlets in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Atlanta and contributed to a number of publications, including The Root and The American Prospect, among many others.