What's White and Black and Red (Read) All Over?

That old joke was told repeatedly when I was a child. There were two correct answers: 1) a newspaper and 2) a sun-burnt zebra. But neither of these were what immediately came to mind. Instead, the question always aroused suspicion that the answer had something to do with race. It was the 1950s and race was on everyone's mind.

Recently, we've elected an African American president in The United States. The press has been raising the question of whether America is now past its racial difficulties considering the magnitude of this event, and African Americans are responding indignantly that of course we have not.

Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced his own views on the subject, stating that we are a "a nation of cowards" because it seems we refuse to "dialogue" on the topic. There's nothing new in this. White people have never wanted to have an honest conversation with black people on the subject of race, and black people seem to resort only in accusation when the topic comes up. This is a hard topic, full of recriminations.

Charles Blow writes on the topic in today's Time's Op-Ed pages. Some of what he has to say follows:

First, white people don’t want to be labeled as prejudiced, so they work hard around blacks not to appear so. A study conducted by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that many whites — including those as young as 10 years old — are so worried about appearing prejudiced that they act colorblind around blacks, avoiding “talking about race, or even acknowledging racial difference,” even when race is germane. Interestingly, blacks thought that whites who did this were more prejudiced than those who didn’t.

Second, that work is exhausting. A 2007 study by researchers at Northwestern and Princeton that was published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science found that interracial interactions leave whites both “cognitively and emotionally” drained because they are trying not to be perceived as prejudiced.

The fear of offending isn’t necessarily cowardice, nor is a failure to acknowledge a bias that you don’t know that you have, but they are impediments. We have to forget about who’s a coward and who’s brave, about who feels offended and who gets blamed. Let’s focus on the facts, and let’s just talk.