‘We can be nice or we can be honest’ about race and politics

I told my wife and neighbor last year that I didn’t think America was ready to elect a black president. Obviously, I was wrong. But if only I’d said Americans weren’t ready to “have” a black president.

If only last week’s uproar could be the opening salvos of an honest discussion of race, perhaps we could all learn where we are as a country.

Instead, we’re left to presume the answer is somewhere between former President Jimmy Carter’s allegations that “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man” and the Captain Renault-like “shock” response of others to the idea that there could be racism going on in this establishment.

Carter was both wrong and right. The “demonstrated animosity” we’ve witnessed over the past six months has little to do with race. Instead, it’s simply a sign of the kabuki theater that now passes for political discourse. It’s not enough to just disagree anymore; you now have to be opposed to the point of aneurysm.

Flip through the cable news networks and you’ll witness countless Peter Finch wannabes screaming that they’re “mad as hell and not going to take it any more,” over topics as mundane as what barnyard animal Kanye West personifies.

We used to complain that we were living in a 24-hour news cycle and these guys needed to fill the space. But that’s the not the case anymore. Now we live in a YouTube news cycle, where you sit at your desk, point the camera inward, and scream “look at me” until someone does. Our country’s “grownups” are now taking their messaging cues from our adolescents — and what we’re left watching is juvenile.

Over that backdrop, lay a historic expansion of democratic participation — record numbers of us voted last November. And add the perception that the public seems to care more than ever, even if they don’t, because organizers can simply turn to on-call seat fillers at their rallies. And you’re left with the law of unintended consequences.

Instead of welcoming more voices and sharpening arguments through civil debate and a thoughtful exchange of ideas, this new “democracy” promotes shouting others down and parading with placards parroting cheap laugh lines that only prove clever in the eye of the sign holder.

While these protestors may be making more headlines than headway, they’re stirring up the issue of race that has been haunting us ever since our nation’s inception. It’s not enough that we’ve spent much of our history on these issues, not when more than 200 years later it’s still considered acceptable to resort to racist attempts at humor in place of thoughtful debate and at the expense of commonality and civility.

As commentator E. J. Dionne pointed out when Bill Clinton tried to bridge the divide with his noble initiative on race in 1997: “The classic problem of American ventures in brotherhood and sisterhood,” Dionne said, was that “we can be nice or we can be honest, but we rarely manage both.”

Our country could use an honest conversation on race, but I don’t think we’re ready for it — not as long as we embrace a political climate where we can’t even have a “nice” conversation on any topic of the day.

Clements’ column runs every Monday on the editorial page.