Because the article came to me with several "forwarding messages," I included only the original message with the article in this thread.
Another message attached to that email was actually responsible for this thread:
The points raised in the article would be somewhat difficult to discuss in an interracial setting, I'm afraid. I don't usually feel that way, but the recent reaction to Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright's sermon and Obama's speech on race afterward, make me feel that our nation's greatest wound, the wound against humanity, has never formed "scar tissue" and along the way, it's gotten infected over and over again.
I was interested to see whether a serious discussion of race would be possible in this politically-oriented, fairly well-educated group. It took three pages for us to start sniping.
We are a fairly homogenous bunch here - our language skills are similar, we all seem to be financially "comfortable" enough to have regular Internet access, and the majority of us identify as white. But we have real problems discussing this article. I was hoping we could identify a point we didn't understand or didn't agree with and talk about it, or identify a point we do agree with and thinking about how to change it in our own lives.
But if we aren't able to do that here - relatively anonymously - then I think that email message is right, and it
would be "somewhat difficult" to discuss this article in an interracial setting. For one thing, we'd all need to pay more attention to what we
don't know than to what we do.
