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First Step: Admit It

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Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of "Race Rules" (Vintage, 1997) and "Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion" (Basic Civitas Books, 2003).

One of the reasons race continues to play such a huge role in the culture is that we deny its persistence. When it comes to race, we live in the United States of Amnesia.

The nation thrives on whitewashing its bitter racial conflicts, or at least baptizing them in the healing pools of revisionist mythology.

The Civil War wasn’t fundamentally a conflict of color rooted in slavery but rather a battle over political measures to unify the nation.

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The Supreme Court isn’t a politically motivated body of legal opinion but a neutral, objective forum to adjudicate racial disputes.

Affirmative action is not a provisional remedy for the vicious history of racial discrimination but a set of public policies designed to facilitate preferential treatment for unqualified minorities.

By these and other political and rhetorical maneuvers, the racial status quo -- made up largely of conservative figures who opposed crucial features of the struggle for racial equality, or neoliberal pols uncomfortable with the claims of progressive antiracist activists -- has managed to deflect responsibility for its role in the perpetuation of policies, prejudices and practices it is now supposed to resist.

By rewriting the violent history of race in America, figures in both staunchly conservative and weakly liberal camps are able to appear as allies of racial justice while promoting beliefs and values that severely undermine racial progress.

The denial of our racial past, in some measure, means that we are forever doomed to a battle over just how bad things are in our racial present. If we can’t agree -- and, really, tell the truth -- about the history of race, we can’t tell the truth about the politics of race. The two are indissolubly linked.

The politics of race involves disputes about the persistence of racism; the role of race in deciding the distribution of social goods like education and employment; the place of race in public discourse, whether through presidential commission or informal debates; the political will to address the most damning aspects of discrimination, prejudice and bias; and the acrimonious argument over just how much economic and social resources should be devoted to remedying our racial miasma.

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Many whites feel that they -- which means the government, because many whites identify themselves as “the nation” -- have bent over backward for long enough to accommodate the patently unfair demands of ungrateful and complaining blacks. Many blacks feel that measures such as affirmative action are not the ceiling, but the ground floor, of racial justice, and hence view reparations as the only viable symbol of the nation’s full commitment to bringing true racial justice.

Finally, because race is America’s original sin, there is still a great deal of shame around its discussion that puts roadblocks in the way of open and honest engagement.

Thus, when it comes to race, what philosophers call a category mistake is made: Americans often substitute private belief and personal emotion for public policy and social practice. Many folks were engrossed in discussion over whether Trent Lott was a racist, based on whether he held prejudiced views about blacks, or whether he harbored racial animus in his heart.

Though such matters are important, they are not the most determinative issues in relation to racial justice.

Rather, structural features -- such as deeply ingrained beliefs about race that have taken on a life of their own in the national psyche and that inform practices such as racial profiling -- are much more detrimental to our racial health.

If we are to effectively combat the ongoing rule of race in American life, we must not deny our racial past.

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We must tell the truth about the racial consequences of our political and public policies, and we must look beyond personal sentiment to social practice as a barometer of our racial progress.

The resignation of Lott as Senate Republican majority leader provokes a poignant question: How can an offhand comment topple one of the most powerful men in America?

The answer is no less paradoxical than the painful history of race in our nation. What Lott’s fate proves is that race still has a great deal of potency in our country.

Lott’s downfall also suggests that the politics of race are especially effective, and vicious, when we mask our true feelings and make a scapegoat out of a figure whose political misjudgment ripped the cover from beliefs that are widely held in his party and -- if the truth be told -- in certain quarters of the Democratic Party as well.

If we think that we have solved our problem by replacing Lott, we ignore the history and politics of race to our peril.

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