The people in my mother\u2019s family, on the whole, have always been warm-hearted, decent and tolerant. But the 1968 Trenton riots<\/strong><\/a> threw two or three into a state of race paranoia. They weren\u2019t in that state all alone, either. My mother\u2019s boss, a middle-aged insurance man who\u2019d never in his life shot anything but the breeze, took to packing a .45 under his suit jacket. <\/p>\n In 1969, my grandparents died in a house fire. When my grandfather\u2019s will was read, his family learned he\u2019d picked a black man to help carry his casket. The two had met and bonded through a common love of jazz music. With grief compounding panic, some relatives threatened to boycott the funeral unless the color line were firmly drawn. My great-grandfather, whose Napoleonic gaze could send his wife scurrying for the humidor where he kept the good cigars, did manage to corral them. But the statement had been made. As a reproof, my mother ordered up Mass cards with Martin de Porres\u2019 portrait.<\/p>\n It was a subtle gesture born of a noble assumption: that people of different races would get along perfectly well once they got to know each other. The idea had a good run. It made Norman Lear\u2019s career (just as he, it could be argued, prolonged its). Racists, the presumed flies in the ointment, became stock cultural villains, to the point where a black teenager named Tawana Brawley could lead the media and the legal system on a year-long wild goose chase simply by claiming to have been abducted and raped by white cops. When the words \u201cTAWANA TOLD THE TRUTH\u201d appeared on a wall at the end of Spike Lee\u2019s Do the Right Thing,<\/em> serious people felt free to debate what it could mean, rather than write it off as provocative nonsense. <\/p>\n Granted, taboos on race were often bizarre, and even more often enforced with a complete absence of humor or charity. (A good example would be the Obama campaign\u2019s objection to the New Yorker<\/em> cover depcting the future president in an Arabic djellaba<\/em> and the future first lady as a Black Panther.) Very naturally, breaking them came to represent a good bit of transgressive fun. The dittoheads who made a hit of Paul Shanklin\u2019s \u201cBarack the Magic Negro\u201d<\/strong><\/a> weren\u2019t protesting the proliferation of a literary cliche. They were giggling, \u201cHe totally almost said the N-word! Good times!\u201d<\/p>\n The run of that idea \u2014 that suppressing racial grudges is vital to the maintenance of a healthy society \u2014 may just about have come to an end. Now, among presidential candidates, heavy-footedness on race confers a certain respectability. Newt Gingrinch broke the collective responsibility barrier<\/strong><\/a> by telling a mainly white audience: \u201cI will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.\u201d Though Ron Paul has taken pains to disavow the race-baiting in his old newsletters Freedom Report <\/em>and Survival Report,<\/em> he might be gilding the lily-white, so to speak. James Kirchik published his expose<\/strong><\/a> in 2008; since then, Paul\u2019s candidacy has only become more viable and relevant.<\/p>\n Other candidates in other elections have made appeals to lingering racial anxieties, but the appeals have always been coded or furtive. The Willie Horton ads<\/strong><\/a> that ran during George H.W. Bush\u2019s 1988 campaign made no overt reference to Horton\u2019s race \u2014 except, of course, for the photographs that accompanied the somber pitch. The rumor that John McCain had sired a mixed-race baby out of wedlock<\/strong><\/a> was spread by push poll and e-mail, and was couched in a more general assault on the candidate\u2019s integrity.<\/p>\n Of course, nobody\u2019s come right out and said, \u201cracism is good,\u201d or quoted Edmund Burke on the positive value of prejudice. Instead, goes the unofficial line, racism no longer exists; it\u2019s a big liberal myth. Earlier in the campaign season, Herman Cain told Candy Crowley:<\/strong><\/a> \u201cI don\u2019t believe there is racism in this country today that holds anybody back in a big way.\u201d When Juan Williams suggested the message he wanted to deliver to the NAACP might be insulting to blacks, Gingrich answered flatly,<\/strong><\/a> \u201cNo, I don\u2019t see that.\u201d This led WSJ\u2019s James Taranto to declare Gingrich\u2019s statement \u201cthe most compelling dramatization of racial progress so far this century.\u201d <\/p>\n Imagine if President Obama, instead of disavowing any sympathy for the views of Reverend Wright, had said, \u201cThe man has a point. America is damnable but I can fix it.\u201d This is where we\u2019re at now. I don\u2019t like it. History is weighty. It\u2019s understandable that sensibilities should be fragile. If the promise of goodwill between the races was a lie, it was a Noble Lie, grounded in a belief in human nature\u2019s openness to improvement. Kansas House Speaker Mike O\u2019Neal set a good example here when he took flack for circulating two e-mails. One<\/strong><\/a> referred to the first lady as \u201cMrs. YoMama\u201d; the other<\/strong><\/a> invoked Psalm 109 (\u201cLet his days be few and brief\u201d) against the president himself. In apologizing for the first while standing his ground on the second, O\u2019Neal proved you can be a hard-knuckled partisan SOB and a gentleman on race at one and the same time.<\/p>\n I\u2019d like to send a copy of this to Newt Gingrich. Or maybe I\u2019ll just send him a prayer card with Martin de Porres on it. I\u2019m afraid we\u2019ve come to a point where apologists for racial sensitivity will have to resort to dog whistles.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The people in my mother\u2019s family, on the whole, have always been warm-hearted, decent and tolerant. But the 1968 Trenton riots threw two or three into a state of race paranoia. They weren\u2019t in that state all alone, either. My mother\u2019s boss, a middle-aged insurance man who\u2019d never in his life shot anything but the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27,49,317,284,188,201,316,208],"class_list":["post-2624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barack-obama","tag-catholicism","tag-mike-oneal","tag-newt-gingrich","tag-politics","tag-race","tag-ron-paul","tag-saints"],"yoast_head":"\n