Prometheus 6

Ezra Klein carried on the discussion with Kevin Drum yesterday, addressing a point Mr. Drum made that I dropped when I quoted the paragraph to help keep some focus.

I'm not sure this is really fair. First off, is there really a storybook version of civil rights that says we've overcome all our race problems in America? If there is, I haven't heard it. Even conservatives who promote the "colorblind society" trope mostly don't pretend that racism is completely dead and buried (they just don't want to do anything about it in the present), and liberals talk about it regularly. So does the media, both print and TV. It's not a nonstop topic of conversation, but it's hardly ignored, and it's never presented as something solely of the past. Just 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.

Anyway, Ezra says:

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.

I think I should tell you I'm beyond anger. I'm not talking about this sort of thing. I'm saying I've reached the point in my life where I'm simply not surprised when I encounter racism. Neither am I surprised when I don't. I feel there's a chance the next person I meet will be a racist, that it would be foolish of me to go through life expecting to be untouched by wrong ideas. I think if I spent all my time trying to educate white folks on my view of racism, my efforts would vanish like a pebble thrown into the ocean.

I think white folks can educate white folks. But I think Black folk have no more claim on the moral progress of white folks than they have on our education and economic progress. And I think Black people would best progress by working to defeat, rather than end, racism.