Dayo Olopade liked Eric Holder's race speech:
Should Holder's message come as such a surpise? Polls suggest that the percentage of Americans who count at least one black friend has jumped 25 percent since 1973. But what about two black friends? Real friends? (Barack Obama doesn’t count.) Little current data exist, but now that the bar for “post-racial” interaction has been raised, American failures become more obvious. So Holder decried “electronically padlocked suburbs” alongside “race protected cocoons,” and also lamented the caging of race-based topics that are not to be brought up in mixed company—which, as Obama’s speech pointed out, “find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table” instead of being aired in plain view. Holder's conclusion, that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have” sounds the alarm: America is still segregated, is still blind to its uphill climb, is still afraid of itself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates found Holder's speech boring, perhaps because Holder said almost nothing he hadn't already heard. But the defensive, hysterical reaction on the right practically proves both Holder's and Olopade's points; in things social we often remain as separate as the fingers. This is not, as Holder suggests, the same as it was fifty years ago. But I think black folks who straddle class and racial lines become very aware of how separate things remain, because we often end up having to juggle very different social spheres. To put it bluntly, I can't remember the last time I was hanging out with a racially mixed group of friends. I'm either hanging out with black people or I'm hanging out with white people, and that's not in any way by design.
Holder's speech was if not interesting, important for a different reason. Most people focused on the content of the speech rather than what it means for a Department of Justice whose mandate to protect the vote for people of all races and origins was abdicated, and whose energies were directed to protecting a religious majority from "discrimination" while all but ignoring discrimination against women and people of color. Holder's speech is less important for what it said than for what it means for his tenure as Attorney General. Fox News' Megyn Kelly understood that much, and understood why it was significant, even if she believes the Justice Department was "reasonable" in abdicating its traditional duties.
-- A. Serwer