As the Daily Show clip I posted last night suggested, Barack Obama's speech on race didn't so much open a conversation on race as it furthered chatter about the campaign. Which is a pity. But read EJ Dionne today for some of the commentary that we should be hearing. He recalls that Martin Luther King Jr.'s preaching was also laced with anger towards White America, and towards much of American policy, but that these elements of his philosophy came out in black churches, not the public square. Similarly, Wright's words were in front of a black audience. What people are so afraid of in "an honest conversation about race" is that, when you drop the constraints of courtesy, when a pleasant interaction is no longer the overriding imperative, that you'll find anger, despair, and dissent. We've been pretty good about banishing overt racial anger or hatred from the public square, but a side effect has been that we've suppressed the whole of the conversation. America tells itself a story about its history with race, and the story is that it has a history with race, abuses that were long ago corrected by brave civil rights reformers and courageous politicians. But there's a present with race, too. We're just much better at ignoring it. And it's a tremendous indictment of our media that, given an opportunity, to push forward on that discussion, they made an affirmative decision to focus back in on the campaign. You wonder if Wolf Blitzer and Candy Crowley and all the rest got into journalism believing that, one day, they would decide to suppress a potentially historic and important conversation on race in order to talk about polling.
