When this dimbulb says youve got a problem, youve probably got a problem.
  • Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com
  • When this dimbulb says you've got a problem, you've probably got a problem.

Yesterday, the internet split into three factions: you had the people who could only talk about Ferguson, Eric Garner, and the protests that have spread across the country over the last week; you had the media folks who were obsessed with the meltdown at The New Republic, in which a large chunk of the staff quit in indignation; and you had the people who were obsessed with the live staging of Peter Pan that was on TV last night. Once or twice on my Twitter feed last night, I couldn't tell the difference between people complaining about the inherent racism of the Lost Boys and the people arguing about the NYPD's institutional racism. Things got confusing. They got even more confusing when some Twitter users pointed out that the people who were obsessed with The New Republic were mostly white men, and the white men got offended and started arguing about why The New Republic matters to America and is not just a stupid little media story.

It's a fairly common occurrence for think-pieces to end with some insistence that "America needs to have a conversation about race," but America talks about race all the time—from TV musicals to magazine restructurings, race always comes up. The problem is, we Americans need to be much smarter about the way we talk about race. Especially white Americans. We need to realize some fundamental truths about conversation. Simply acknowledging a problem doesn't make the problem go away. Conversation is not a tennis match in which one person is declared a winner. Playing devil's advocate doesn't help anything. There are too many specific examples of racism for a hypothetical situation to be valuable. The first step for any conversation is admitting there's a real race problem in America.

As Jon Stewart acknowledged on his show the night the Eric Garner protests began, this month's news is all the proof we'll ever need that "we are definitely not living in a post-racial society." For God's sake, even George W. Bush just admitted on national television that "the verdict [in the Eric Garner case] was hard to understand." He said he had dinner with "Condi"—who apparently never tires of being Bush's black friend—the other night and she told him "you gotta understand that there are a lot of black folks around who are just incredibly—who are more and more distrusting of law enforcement." This sounds like it's news to Bush, who then calls this "a shame, because law enforcement's job is to protect everybody." If even the dumbest man to ever become president recognizes that American law enforcement has a race problem, I think it's fair to call this an accepted truth.

But because so much of the conversation on televised media has been so stupid, focusing on race in only a remedial way, bigots are getting bolder in real life. Travis Gettys at Raw Story reports that a "group of Ferguson protesters were met Thursday afternoon with Confederate flags, racist symbols, and gunfire as they marched through a pair of rural Missouri towns." I'm half-expecting one of those bigots to wind up as a talking head on Fox News explaining how they're just demonstrating their "opinion." There are some perspectives we as a society do not need to reward with a microphone.

Meanwhile, the body count keeps rising. Late last night, news spread about the shooting death of a 34 year-old African-American father named Rumain Brisbon. The officer who shot Brisbon mistook a pill bottle in Brisbon's pocket for a gun. Add pill bottles to the long list of objects—wallets, cell phones, drivers licenses—that black men are not allowed to carry in public, under penalty of death.

And still progressives expect President Obama to sweep in with a great speech, followed by actions that will somehow heal the nation. But Obama himself is fighting a battle against institutional racism; Timothy Egan published a great editorial in the New York Times yesterday acknowledging that fact. "From the day [Obama] took office," Egan writes, "his legitimacy has been challenged, his American birth has been suspect, and he’s been personally insulted, lectured, yelled at and disrespected in public, by public figures, in a way that few if any American presidents have ever faced." There can be no doubt that the majority of this loathing is due to the president's race. If you need any more proof, consider the fact that certain Republican members of the House are calling for Republican leadership to not invite President Obama to deliver the State of the Union Address next year. This is an unprecedented level of disrespect; even Democrats who (rightfully) did not acknowledge George W. Bush's legitimacy as president in his first term didn't call for these kinds of extreme measures. These are the actions of a people who are unwilling to believe that a black man is good enough to be president of the United States. When the representatives of one half the nation refuse to accept Obama's personhood, how can he be expected to resolve American racism?

And so now, because there are no easy answers, we're at the end of the think-piece, and as I warned you before, there's only one ending this think-piece could possibly have. We need to have a better version of the conversation we're having. We need to be smarter.