A National Conversation on Race

For as long as I can remember liberals have liked to suggest that we need a “national conversation” on something or other.

As often as not, that national conversation was about race.

Of course, liberals were not actually proposing a real national conversation about race. They were proposing something rather different and rather more sinister.

They were proposing to tell Americans what to think about race, what to feel about race, what to do about race, and if you didn’t agree with their prescriptions you had better shut up. Because if your voiced your disagreement you would be branded as a racist.

We know what this was all about. It was all about power, liberal power. The liberal ownership of the race issue allowed them to corral about 90 percent of the black vote, ever since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. With that vote liberals could stop any reform of the welfare state and maintain their power, their perquisites, and their tenure.

In this liberal policy on race there were good cops and bad cops. Liberals were the good cops, telling us that their race-based quotas and set-asides were all for our own good. Then there were the bad cops, the black race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and at the local level, men like Jeremiah Wright, pastor of a black nationalist church in Chicago..

The job of the good cops was to keep the white population cowed. The job of the bad cops was to keep blacks voting Democrat in a frenzy of race rage.

Then along came Barack Obama and promised Unity and Change. He was understood instinctively by white college-educated Democrats as offering a way out of the race ravine. In the words of Shelby Steele, Obama is a “bargainer,” offering “the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism.”

It’s lucky for Obama that he came along when he did. I’d say that American whites are getting close to the point where they are going to say “enough already” on race and refuse to be cowed by the race baiters.

But it turns out that Barack Obama is not exactly the race healer he pretends to be. How could he be when he has been attending a church of race hatred for most of his adult life. Barack Obama is asking us to believe that he is a race healer when he has belonged to a church, the biggest black church in Chicago, run by race baiter Jeremiah Wright.

[N]othing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable.

You know what, liberals? I think we are about to have a national conversation on race. And this will be the first one in living memory in which liberals don’t get to set the rules.

So there’s a chance that the conversation will be a real conversation. For the first time in living memory.