An Honest Conversation on Race? Hah!

I think that we can now safely dispense with all that nonsense about having an “honest conversation” on race in America. Conservatives knew all along that this invitation to conversation was nothing more than bait for a poorly disguised trap. And any doubts about that trap were dispelled when leftists tripped the jaws too early.
After Hurricane Katrina exhausted itself over New Orleans, television revealed to us that the surviving victims were predominately poor blacks who, we were told, were unable to escape before the storm struck. Democrats immediately pounced, declaring that the racial disproportionality of the victims revealed something about our deficiencies as a nation. And, it was high time we talked about it.
Of course, the trap was never very well disguised. Democrats immediately accused the Bush Administration of abandoning New Orleans precisely because the city was predominantly black. That was a good start to an honest conversation, wasn’t it?
To get a taste of just how honestly liberals can discuss race, one only needs to look at the manufactured controversies this last month involving two football coaches who noted that black football players are generally fleeter afoot than their pallid teammates.
"You have to be careful the way you say things sometimes," Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno said. "Poor [Air Force coach] Fisher DeBerry got in trouble, but the black athlete has made a big difference. They have changed the whole tempo of the game. Black athletes have just done a great job as athletes and as people in turning the game around."
DeBerry got himself into trouble by noting that a recent opponent ran right past his team because they had more black athletes on their roster who, “ran a lot faster than we did.”
That both of these coaches got into deep politically correct difficulties for remarking the obvious reveals more about how impossible it is to discuss race honestly with liberals than the hurricane exposed about racial disparities.
Never mind that every four years the Olympic Games provide incontrovertible support for Paterno and DeBerry’s theses. Who wins the 100-meter dash every four years? How about the 200-meter dash, the 400 and usually even the 800? It’s been 25 years since a white guy won an Olympic sprint, and that required a United States boycott of the Moscow games. Are Olympic results racist?
What DeBerry and Paterno need to work on is polishing their clichés. They should have said that they needed more black athletes to advance diversity. To win, a football coach needs a defensive backfield and a receiver corps that looks like America.
Before DeBerry and Paterno had the forces of liberalism screaming for their hides, Bill Bennett learned just how impossible it was to discuss race honestly. On his radio show, Bennett was having a conversation with an economist who was arguing that abortion should be opposed because Social Security’s funding difficulties were traceable to the millions of Americans who had not been born and would now be taxpayers were it not for abortion. Bill Bennett objected saying that one should not reduce moral questions to expediency. If one were to reduce the debate to expediency, then one could take the wholly immoral position in favor of abortion, arguing that aborting blacks would reduce crime rates.
Bennett was employing an extreme position to make a point. But quite predictably, liberals pounced accusing Bennett of racism. Never mind that the crime rate among blacks is significantly higher than whites and therefore, Bennett’s blunt appraisal was uncomfortably honest.
One reason that we will never have an honest conversation on race is because liberals will never permit any discussion that does not begin by blaming white racism for all the ills that plague blacks. That would be dishonest, as black culture is often self-destructive.
For example, if one takes more than a cursory glance at those who were suffering post-Katrina in the Superdome, one would have noticed that the victims were not just predominantly black, but also disproportionately females with children. People of pallor have nothing to do with the prevalence of fatherless households in black neighborhoods.
Let’s face it. If we cannot even acknowledge that, on average, blacks run faster than whites without the race bullies trying to intimidate the speaker, what chance is there that we can conduct a genuinely substantive discussion of race? Absolutely none.