Talking to white people

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 12:54:32 PM MST

So. Obama responds - thoughtfully - and we get this as a response:

The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: "But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now."

As soon as I heard that, I knew what we'd have to endure. I knew that there would be a stampede of editorial boards, columnists and academics rushing not to ignore race. A national conversation about race! At long last!

...The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race....

Racial progress has in fact continued in America. A new national conversation about race isn't necessary to end what Obama calls the "racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years" - because we're not stuck in such a stalemate. In fact, as Obama himself suggests in the same speech, younger Americans aren't stalemated. They come far closer than their grandparents and parents to routinely obeying Martin Luther King's injunction to judge one another by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.

Over the last several decades, we've done pretty well in overcoming racial barriers and prejudice. Problems remain. But we won't make progress if we now have to endure a din of race talk that will do more to divide us than to unite us, and more to confuse than to clarify.

(A) So...Kristol's pals invoke race at every corner, Obama responds...and Obama's at fault here? Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

(B) Apparently Kristol missed out on this column, worth quoting again, and somehow evocative of the general tenor of right-spawned race rhetoric about the Obama campaign, if a little more bald-faced:

It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, "everybody but the rioters themselves"... Was "white racism" really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities[?]...

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?....

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

Dave Niewert:

What you'll notice in all this, of course, is that all these folks really aren't concerned about black people at all. They're talking to white people, and basically reinforcing the stereotypical view that there's just something wrong with those black people. Why else can't they see that conservatism is really about their greater good?