Dialogue On Race Could Begin On Hallowed Ground

Dialogue On Race Could Begin On Hallowed Ground
By John Kass
The wounds inflicted on Barack Obama by the hateful speech of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are serious and profound. Why else would ministers gather at Obama's church in Chicago—Trinity United Church of Christ—to hold a news conference demanding a "sacred" national dialogue on race?

"The intersection of politics, religion and race has heightened our awareness of how easy it is for our conversations about race to become anything but sacred," Rev. John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, said last week. "That's why we are calling for sacred conversations, and for the respect of sacred places to begin right here and now." In other words, listen up you reporters: Back off. (snip)

Actually, we don't talk about race. Instead, we talk about talking about race, which is easy. TV does it best. Slap an angry Wright up on the screen and a reasonable Obama, and then go find some tape of an angry white guy and you're home for supper. But if we really talked about race, we'd really talk about unfair racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions, in hiring and on tax-subsidized public contracts. We'd talk about the horrendous drop-out rate in big city high school systems run by political bosses who, year after year after year, use minority school children as cash cows to cement their power.

It's been so corrosive for so long, black resentment over white bigotry and white resentment over racial preferences (which is, in effect, institutionalized racism); and the abandonment of minority schools, generation after generation dropping out, left behind. We can't talk about it. It gets too loud and too angry too fast.But I know a quiet place, where you can think about race and sacrifice. It's not an angry place now. It's sacred...

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