This is exactly right. We all of us have racist feelings, or other bigoted attitudes like anti-Semitism. The people who create the most problems are those who won’t admit their common, human fallibility. And those in the public realm who globalize this attitude, claiming that racism is a thing of the past, do the most harm.

Admitting it, and working to change it as you do, makes you part of the solution.

The last time I checked, there were more people of Mexican descent in Chicago than in any other U.S. city save L.A. or San Antonio. Though I’m sure it was a Boricua that took the phone. [Yes, I'm Mexican-American.]

Classic ‘racial panic’ scene from John Waters’ film Hairspray [starts at 8:45 or so]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNXOUiN4Nu4

The above-quoted text is the best part of this post, and it’s a decent enough post. There’s something to the idea that certain public figures in the political establishment implicitly stoke the ashes of race-based discontent without employing any type of outright animosity. Others’ picking up on this enabling language, however, does free up the offender to then himself become the victim of hateful speech or reverse racism, as Matt Yglesias has amply documented.

But then, I guess that’s the whole idea of race-baiting. This slowly dawned on me as I wrote this. Welcome to the real world, Michael.

But those who immediately and harshly react to any suggestion of racial impropriety don’t want any discussion at all. And that’s what a really huge amount of our racial dialogue, at present, amounts to, a sustained campaign to whittle down the parameters of appropriate debate, and to cast anyone who alleges racism or something like it out of the bounds of respectability.

I think this is exactly right. In this respect, segments of the Right resemble segments of the Left who advocate anti-hate-speech rules. Both posit that certain words (racial epithets, or accusations of racism) somehow break the marketplace of ideas and render the target incapable of response. This is ridiculous. The right response to both is more speech. You respond to the bigot with condemnation and ridicule, you respond to the race-pimp who unjustifiably cries racism with condemnation and ridicule.

There is genuine political correctness we should be concerned about — like the censorious abuse of official power that The FIRE fights against, for instance. But nowadays too many people use “political correctness” to mean “that unpleasant prevailing social condition under which I cannot act like an asshat without someone calling me an asshat.” Bunk.

Rather, we’ve been sensitized to race as the marker of such things. It may in fact be a less perfect predictor of anything (I don’t know, because we don’t compile and publish enough census data on other plausibly useful characteristics) but we have learned to notice and accept it’s importance prima facie at the exclusion of other, potentially more relevant information about the people we’re around. And when we tell stories like this one, we reify those racial details as the important ones.

But we don’t talk much about why indeed those are the important elements of the story, the essential details that convey who the characters are and what we’re to think of them. Thanks for prompting us to have more of that conversation, Freddie.