Philly made national headlines after 10 suspensions were handed out at South Philadelphia High School last Thursday. Suspensions came after two days of fights between Asian kids and African American kids. The AP reported on the story Saturday, and it’s been picked up by news outlets all over the country – as far out as San Diego and Seattle. Drudge Report had it up on Monday.

While racial violence is never cool, it seems as though the national attention paid to this story has only made matters worse. News organizations and commentators have used it for their continuing Swift Boat-style assault against the idea that Barack Obama’s presidency didn’t make America a post-racial utopia (an idea they created), and dredging up every example they can to fuel the conversation.

This phenomenon is nothing new. It began early on in the campaign and peaked when Obama’s ascent to the presidency became an inevitability.

On October 19, 2008, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for president. The following Monday, Rush Limbaugh not-so-discreetly or eloquently explained his feelings on why General Powell chose Obama over McCain: “It was totally about race,” Limbaugh said. “The Powell nomination – or endorsement – totally about race.” This was, of course, what Limbaugh and his minions call “reverse racism” (or, if you will, the wrong kind of racism).

Drudge Report, the race bait champion of 2009, headlined Limbaugh’s remarks and has been adding to the media garbage heap since.

As gossip website Gawker has documented over and over again, Drudge is obsessed with angry black people. And unlike Fox commentator Glenn Beck, who practices overt racial buffoonery while telling his audience Barack Obama’s stimulus is actually about “reparations”, Drudge sticks to icy, racial flirtation through headlines. For instance, back in September, Drudge’s headline about Obama’s sinking poll numbers: “Obama’s Negs Rise.”

The next week, in Illinois, a student was beat up on a bus, and it was filmed. The student was white. The attackers were black. The nation’s seventh-largest news site’s top headline read: “White Student Beaten On School Bus; Crowd Cheers.”

While talking about Drudge’s headline, Rush Limbaugh called for school bus segregation to stop white kids from getting beat up again, then blamed the incident on Obama: “In Obama’s America,” he said, “the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on.”

Drudge then obsessed over Serena Williams’ fit during the U.S. Open with a headline quote on his page, and cropped the picture next to an angry-looking Obama with the headline reading “They can’t stop us” on healthcare.

Also in September, Dan Riehl, of the conservative blog Riehl World View posted a drawn out fantasy, claiming he’d have been able to beat up black kids after the 9/12 Tea Patriot march – if they’d messed with him. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs humorously dubbed Rieh’s blog: “Dan Riehl’s Imaginary Black Kid Beatdown.”

Drudge, Limbaugh and conservative blogs know who their audiences are. So you can only blame them for race baiting as much as you could’ve blamed Ronald Reagan when he made up a story about a Chicago “welfare queen” who’d mysteriously ripped $150,000 off from the government. His story, though fiction, pissed people off and likely got them to the polls – because it played into their racial generalizations and gave them an enemy.

And now these generalizations are actually hurting some local kids. Never mind violence in South Philadelphia High School is down 50% from this time last year. You wouldn’t know it if you took a stroll down Broad Street this week. According to the Daily News: “The district has cracked down, increasing the number of school police on foot patrol in the area and redeploying school security to the school’s hot spots…City police also are lending assistance.”

Eleventh grader John Harris told the Philadelphia Daily News of the crackdown: “I got nothing to do with it. Just because we’re black, they think we’re in gangs.”

Trina Moore, 17, said: “I feel offended…they labeled all of us.”

To patch the wound, school superintendent Adriene Ackerman is expected to announce the creation of a diversity committee to make recommendations for the school next month. District officials met with police chief Ramsey as 50 Asian students have spent the last two days boycotting.

Call it what you will (the school making an example due to overwhelming press coverage; a total lockdown to get some real change done; some combination of the two) but the school and Philadelphia police seem to be excessively attacking this problem when only 10 students were suspended over the incident.

Both Philly and America have never had a good reputation when it came to race relations. Be it Frank Rizzo’s joyful nightstick snapshots, the MOVE bomb, or America’s whole 300 years of slavery thing, it’s hard to imagine these issues are going to change overnight. Or with the help of some committee to, I believe, appease a national audience.

But it doesn’t matter. The media’s continued stereotyping get us more of the same: An obsession with angry black people, talk radio’s overt racist commentary on the subject, and bloggers grammatically fantasizing about physical assault.