Kevin Drum disagrees with my post saying "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." "I'm not sure this is really fair," he writes. "To give a couple of recent high-profile examples, the New York Times won a Pulitzer for its yearlong 'How Race is Lived in America' in 2001 and the Washington Post spent half of 2006 on its 'Being a Black Man' series. Last year, The Race Beat won the Pulitzer in history. In 2005, the LA Times won it in the Public Service category for its series about the King/Drew medical center." But those examples sort of make the point, no? They're good reporting motivated by an enlivening sense of civic duty, but insofar as they're part of a conversation on race, they're largely white elites peering at Black America and professing concern that they seem to be so poor. They're not a conversation. They have no place for the anger of Jeremiah Wright, or indeed of Prometheus 6. To me, the most powerful portion of Obama's speech was when he admitted "For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table...like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation." There's still a lot of racial anger in this country, and the way we've dealt with it, in part, has been to censure its public expression. That has had some positive impacts -- you can't wander around slurring people because of their skin color -- but it's also driven honest expressions of anger or resentment into private settings. That may be superior in the sense of helping everyone get along, but occasionally, the communities collide, as they're doing at the moment, and a lot of the shock over Wright is, I think, a simple forgetfulness that these feelings still exist. If we really were having a consistent conversation over race, I think Wright's words would be a lot less surprising.
