Race: Are we ready for a ‘national conversation’?

“For a people so obsessed with race,” said Leonard Pitts Jr. in The Miami Herald, Americans sure would rather avoid the topic, so fearful are we of giving offense, or of revealing our secret prejudices. Last week in Philadelphia, however, we lost our “last excuse” for not tackling the subject head-on. In his widely acclaimed speech on race in America, Barack Obama not only called for a “national conversation” about the persistent distrust and animosity among America’s different racial groups, he showed us how to have one. Obama “spoke to, rather than around, the great unspoken that sits in the middle of so many of our interactions with one another,” said Sherrilyn Ifill in the Baltimore Sun. He articulated the private resentments of black and white Americans with a directness and a sense of balance we’ve seldom heard. The question now, though, is whether ordinary Americans are ready to address the issue of race with the kind of “honesty and complexity Mr. Obama delivered.”

“Let’s not and say we did,” said William Kristol in The New York Times. Call me cynical, but these national conversations never seem to accomplish very much. A decade ago, President Clinton announced “with great fanfare” that he’d be leading the nation in a conversation about race. That effort “quickly went nowhere. And just as well.” The way to solve problems, including those afflicting African-Americans, is through “sober, results-oriented debates” about economics, education, and social policy, not by sharing our feelings as if we were all on Oprah. A spectacle like that would be worse than pointless, said Gregory Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times. Indulging and expressing our racial grievances only “perpetuates the divisions of the past.”

True, “wallowing in this country’s sordid racial history would be a mistake,” said Sally Lehrman in The Boston Globe. But a bigger mistake would be to leave our racial fears and resentment to fester, unspoken. Our gripes and prejudices affect our behavior, whether we express them or not. In fact, those private, back-of-the-mind attitudes have a marked tendency to grow more powerful if we’re never forced to articulate them or even consciously admit them to ourselves. The reality is that “we can’t just make race go away” by ignoring it, or through wishful thinking, or even by “electing a mixed-race president.” The only viable approach is the one Obama demonstrated in Philadelphia, addressing the suspicion and bitterness that divide us in the language of “shared values and collective interest.”

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