Well, the Xmas Ornament party at Casa de Armed Liberal came off with few if any obvious hitches; the incontinent cat didn’t piddle on the tree, no one mugged us to steal her needles, everyone get fed and watered (or cidered or Cava-ed), and (other than my psycho ex-Sheriff dear friend) no weapons were brandished or actually drawn.
Ann Salisbury, Kevin Drum, and Martin Devon were kind enough to join us, and while I tried to get them to separate and mingle, the politics attractor was just too strong.
A few other guests fell into their pull, and we got a few good discussions going, the most heated of which involved (surprise!) race…
It was an interesting (if lily-white) discussion, with a wide range of views represented.
The two major clusters were centered around Kevin and Ann, who made the ‘racism exists and the government needs to do something about it’ argument (I’m not exactly making all the subtleties in their real arguments, but I’m just planting a flag here) and the ex-cop who made the ‘you have no idea what you’re talking about in the real world, and until the culture of victimization and entitlement changes, nothing’s going to get better’ argument.
No one changed anyone else’s mind (what a surprise!) and it was hard to even find a common set of facts, statistics or anecdotes to agree on.
My reaction then, and now, was fairly complex: What if they’re both right? Because in reality, I tend to think that there are five basic groups of thought on the subject of race.
We have race-baiters and bashers of both the left and right. I’m sorry, but Al Sharpton has more in common, in my mind, with David Duke than with anyone else. Without the cloud of racial animus they both rely on and rhetorically keep inflated, they’d have to get real jobs.
That’s two.
We have a bunch of people who really don’t have a clue, either because (it’s possible) they’re so enlightened that they have transcended race, or because they don’t spend one brain cell’s worth of effort thinking about these issues. I periodically go to the motorcycle races in Rosamond, in the far northern desert suburbs of Los Angeles, and one thing I’ve noticed is the prevalence of clumps of young teens wandering around looking for whatever young teens are looking for on a weekend day…and these clumps are often multiracial. I don’t think these kids spend a lot of time dealing with issues of race, and that’s OK with me.
And the final two are the highly political but well-intentioned on both sides of the issue.
One side believes that only the active intervention of the highest levels of government – which stopped lynching, integrated schools and businesses, and broke the hard color lines that existed as recently as 40 years ago – can keep the weak minority from being crushed by the majority.
The other side believes that the damage done to the minority by the programs which were established to help them far outweighs any benefits.
Sadly, while I believe that each of these groups is well-intentioned, each of them is somewhat in thrall to their extremist partners, who set boundaries on the debate.
On the Right, they simply refuse to acknowledge the depth of real harm done in the past, as well as the simple fact that the harm was only undone by the direct forceful intervention of the Federal Government. It’s equally difficult for them to talk about the real straits the black underclass is in.
On the Left, it is impossible to talk about any of the negative impacts of racial policies and government intervention … on minorities or on society as a whole … without immediately being exiled as a racist. And it’s impossible for them to break out of the old metaphors of the continuing exploited position of African Americans in America, even when confronted with Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Glen Reynolds’ future sister-in-law, or my friend’s black wife.
Now I’ve been dinged in the past for piling on my liberal allies.
Let me make a simple point: I’m not interested in helping build a strong conservative movement here in the U.S. In case you haven’t noticed, that exists. I am interested in seeing a successful liberal movement – which means both that it has to be able to gain power, and once in power actually achieve liberal goals. I’m dubious about the ability of the current liberal movement to do either one.
So let’s talk about what I see as wrong with the liberal position on race.
This weekend’s L.A. Times has a commentary by Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania:

One of the reasons race continues to play such a huge role in the culture is that we deny its persistence. When it comes to race, we live in the United States of Amnesia.
The nation thrives on whitewashing its bitter racial conflicts, or at least baptizing them in the healing pools of revisionist mythology.
The Civil War wasn’t fundamentally a conflict of color rooted in slavery but rather a battle over political measures to unify the nation.
The Supreme Court isn’t a politically motivated body of legal opinion but a neutral, objective forum to adjudicate racial disputes.
Affirmative action is not a provisional remedy for the vicious history of racial discrimination but a set of public policies designed to facilitate preferential treatment for unqualified minorities.
By these and other political and rhetorical maneuvers, the racial status quo — made up largely of conservative figures who opposed crucial features of the struggle for racial equality, or neoliberal pols uncomfortable with the claims of progressive antiracist activists — has managed to deflect responsibility for its role in the perpetuation of policies, prejudices and practices it is now supposed to resist.
By rewriting the violent history of race in America, figures in both staunchly conservative and weakly liberal camps are able to appear as allies of racial justice while promoting beliefs and values that severely undermine racial progress.
The denial of our racial past, in some measure, means that we are forever doomed to a battle over just how bad things are in our racial present. If we can’t agree — and, really, tell the truth — about the history of race, we can’t tell the truth about the politics of race. The two are indissolubly linked.
The politics of race involves disputes about the persistence of racism; the role of race in deciding the distribution of social goods like education and employment; the place of race in public discourse, whether through presidential commission or informal debates; the political will to address the most damning aspects of discrimination, prejudice and bias; and the acrimonious argument over just how much economic and social resources should be devoted to remedying our racial miasma.
Many whites feel that they — which means the government, because many whites identify themselves as “the nation” — have bent over backward for long enough to accommodate the patently unfair demands of ungrateful and complaining blacks. Many blacks feel that measures such as affirmative action are not the ceiling, but the ground floor, of racial justice, and hence view reparations as the only viable symbol of the nation’s full commitment to bringing true racial justice.
Finally, because race is America’s original sin, there is still a great deal of shame around its discussion that puts roadblocks in the way of open and honest engagement.
Thus, when it comes to race, what philosophers call a category mistake is made: Americans often substitute private belief and personal emotion for public policy and social practice. Many folks were engrossed in discussion over whether Trent Lott was a racist, based on whether he held prejudiced views about blacks, or whether he harbored racial animus in his heart.

Boy, there is a lot to talk about here…
First, and foremost, it infuriates me to hear of race as being “America’s original sin”. Someone needs to read a history book or two. Racism and the exploitation of minority races is as old as human history. It has been a feature of every society I know about in history, and it is a feature of every society I know of in the modern world.
Where you don’t see racial conflict, it is for one of two reasons: 1) because one race has killed or otherwise subjugated another, thereby achieving 2) a racially homogenous society, where racial minorities are amusing oddities, and the realities of living alongside other races and cultures don’t have to be dealt with.
I believe America has done more to openly deal with the issues of racial justice in the 19th and 20th centuries than any country or society that I can think of. Europe is just starting down the road of racial politics that America has been on for the last forty years.
Does this mean we’re done? Of course not. But it’s as ludicrous for leftwing advocates of racial justice to argue that we’re living in plantation days as for rightwing advocates of racial purity to argue that life for African Americans in those days wasn’t all that bad.
Alone among Western nations, America retained slavery into the 19th century, and that was an awful sin. But alone among Western nations, we fought a bloody civil war largely triggered by the moral revulsion of one group within America over slavery, and while that blood doesn’t wipe the slate clean, it certainly has to be looked at.
“Many whites feel that they — which means the government, because many whites identify themselves as “the nation” — have bent over backward for long enough to accommodate the patently unfair demands of ungrateful and complaining blacks. Many blacks feel that measures such as affirmative action are not the ceiling, but the ground floor, of racial justice, and hence view reparations as the only viable symbol of the nation’s full commitment to bringing true racial justice.”
Well, that’s interesting…and points out another flaw in the Left’s approach to race. What is the ceiling? What goal line has to be crossed before we can say that we’ve put paid to race as an issue? What is the vision of the desired end state?
Because it does seem to many like what is asked for is in essence a blank check. And at that point, we’re not making policy, we’re engaging in psychodrama. If we want to win on the issue of race, one of the things that we have to have is a clear vision of what winning looks like. We had that in the 60’s. It was black and white children graduating alongside each other at Little Rock High School. It was black and white kids dating at the prom. It was black faces sitting at the tables of power.
OK, we accomplished that.
But we’ve left millions of African American families behind. In education, in earning power, in hope for the future.
What does the answer for them look like?
Answer that question, my fellow liberals, and we can start getting there.
And as an afterthought: If the old vision was “…black and white children graduating alongside each other at Little Rock High School. It was black and white kids dating at the prom,” how do separate graduations and separate proms for African American students fit into the vision?
(added author’s name to the LA Times commentary)