From the same newspaper, same front page:

Top Officials Expand The Dialogue on Race
Month’s Celebrations Evoke a Mix of Views
When the country’s racial chasms seemed to threaten President Obama’s election, his team had to tread carefully. A month into his administration, the tone has changed. Top officials are engaging the subject of race more freely, with a boldness and confidence they once shunned.
With the federal government’s annual African American History Month celebrations as a backdrop, the attorney general, the first lady and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency spoke more frankly about race recently than any of Obama’s surrogates did during the hard-fought campaign.
Lisa P. Jackson, the EPA administrator and a native of New Orleans, told her staff about having grown up in an area where she would have had to drink from unsafe water fountains because of her race. “Now in 2009, I am, along with you, responsible for ensuring that all Americans have clean water to drink,” Jackson said. “Change has certainly come to this agency.”

Me: It goes on to describe how rehashing the same civil rights narrative that is rehashed every Black History Month is now “bold.” But whatever. What I want to know is where this “change” is? What, exactly, is Jackson talking about when she says “change has certainly come to this agency”? Did the EPA not protect the water supply until she got there? Is the EPA going to be different now that it has a black woman in charge? Does the EPA have some kind of racist legacy to live down?

Funny how the same old yakety-yack is now bold and exciting.

Update: Many readers made points along these lines:

Having grown up in the south what is she talking about “had to drink from unsafe water fountains because of her race.”. Yes there were separate but they were always next to the White Only and the water came from the same damn pipe. Not like southern towns had two separate water systems a clean one for whites and a contaminated one for blacks. Now the safety of water in New Orleans in general could be debated because it came from the Miss. River it was understood that every glass you drank and already been drank by 7 other people upstream.