Bill Kristol Becomes the Latest White Bigot to Lecture Us on Race

Bill Kristol, as usual, is wrong about something.

What he's wrong about today is race in America. Now, you, being a sentient human with eyes and/or ears that function to bring information to your brain, may have thought that racism was still a problem in our country. Au contraire! Bill Kristol, you see, thinks that racism isn't a problem at all. At least not one we should talk about:

Racial progress has in fact continued in America. A new national conversation about race isn't necessary to end what Obama calls the "racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years" -- because we're not stuck in such a stalemate. In fact, as Obama himself suggests in the same speech, younger Americans aren't stalemated. They come far closer than their grandparents and parents to routinely obeying Martin Luther King's injunction to judge one another by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.

Over the last several decades, we've done pretty well in overcoming racial barriers and prejudice. Problems remain. But we won't make progress if we now have to endure a din of race talk that will do more to divide us than to unite us, and more to confuse than to clarify.

But to argue that racism doesn't need to be discussed, despite the fact that "problems remain" -- that's unusually wrong, even for Kristol.

It's easy for Kristol to choose to avoid a discussion of race. How, after all, is Kristol affected by racism? It's not a problem for him! And it can only become a problem if we actually talk about things. Then we might have to hear that racism is a problem for people who are not, in fact, rich and white.