‘Honest Conversations’ about Race
And the cynical ends to which they are habitually put
By Kevin D. Williamson — August 19, 2016
‘What this country really needs,” we are endlessly instructed, “is an honest conversation about race.”
Do we ever talk about anything else?
From yesterday’s New York Times: an op-ed dwells on the question of whether voter-ID laws and other anti-fraud measures are the spawn of Jim Crow; Charles M. Blow explains “Why Blacks Loathe Trump”; Nate Parker, a black director, has remade Birth of a Nation, and it is controversial; G-Eazy, a white rapper, de-emphasizes his race, and it is controversial; the lead politics story is Donald Trump’s weakening “pillar of support,” white men; the lead national story concerns allegations of a police cover-up in the shooting of a black man in Chicago; the lead science headline reports that genetic tests contain more errors for black subjects than for white subjects. The New York Daily News offered a report from its race columnist, Shaun King — I am told he is a white man who has spent his adult life pretending to be a black man — under the headline “A tale of two face-eating men in Florida — one white, one black.” The Los Angeles Times contains a column about racists in the Trump campaign and a news item about a wrongful-termination lawsuit involving allegations of racism in the LAPD. The San Francisco Chronicle is remarkably light on race news, possibly owing to the fact that San Francisco has exiled much of its non-white/non-Asian population (its black population has declined by more than a third since 1990), which is the subject of a story headlined “Feds reject housing plan meant to help minorities stay in SF.”
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/439168/print
