Mr Moran:
“The knee-jerk reaction of both sides to the incident has revealed the enormous difficulty in making any real, substantive progress in arriving at a true “post-racial” America.”
“We don’t talk about “race relations” in America. The subject is too painful, too charged with memories of past sins and filled with portent for our present standoffs to deal with directly. This is true of both sides. Talking about race — really getting down to the nitty gritty and exposing our fears, our hopes, our biases, our misconceptions, and, ultimately, our human failings in being prejudiced simply because someone doesn’t look like us — cannot be done in a political context.”
Mr Moran,
Don’t speak for me and the miilions of immigrants who have nothing to do with America’s past sins. I speak about race relations all the time, whenever I can. If you and your friends are shy about speaking up about race, and have “biases/fears/misconceptions,” too bad, but that does not describe me, and I think anyone who is afraid to speak up in a free society is a coward. My only fear is totalitarianism, whatever the color/race it happens to come packaged in. There’s nothing “painful” in discussing any political and social issue. “Pain” is justified and relevant when you are on the shrink’s couch, not to mature political debate. Imagine any of the Founding Fathers or Lincoln refusing to debate because it was too “painful.”
Knee-jerk reaction on both sides of the incident?? No way. A rainbow coalition of cops show up to the place of a reported incident of breaking and entering, apparently in progress. That’s what they have to do, or else you wouldn’t be secure in your neighborhood–I guess you don’t live in the most insecure ones…
Next, black prof, confronted with a white cop, refuses, initially, to produce proof of address, yelling “Why, because I’m a black man in America?”, setting up the racial confrontation.
