It's hard to believe there's now less than a week until our quadrennial fever dream is finally over.  Obama's infomercial last night was a real tear-jerker.  It struck me as an excellent idea for a modern version of FDR's famous Fireside Chats.  If Obama is elected I think a half-hour Dog-Whisperer kind of show hosted by the President would be a great idea.  Take two or three American families (you might consider including some Asian-Americans and Latinos in an episode or two), show their struggles, and then have government come in and solve them.  And give away a few Priuses.  

There are a couple things that concerned commentators still think could cause Obama to lose what now looks like a lock on the election.  One is mischief at the polls, particularly with Diebold's voting machines (but seriously), and the other is what is being called "implicit racism". (After I took the Implicit Association Test I got the following evaluation, just so you'll know for future reference: "Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for African American compared to European American." Size matters, people.  But, for the record, there were no Latinos or Slavs in the survey or the results may have been very different.)

I also took the U of C shooter test mentioned in a couple of recent New York Times op-eds about "our racist, sexist selves" by Nicholas Kristof, who has taken white guilt to the limit of its benevolent manifestations with his admirable advocacy of Africa, coupled with regular admissions of his own implicit racism.  When I took the test, I shot armed whites slightly quicker than blacks (882.88ms versus 898.72ms), but I took much longer to determine that blacks did not have a weapon (1151.24ms) than was the case with whites (913.84ms).  I don't know what this means.  And my score of 275 has me completely baffled.  All I know is that I don't like that my options for interacting are limited to shooting or not shooting someone.  I feel like life is slightly more nuanced than that sometimes.   

Of course, it's easy enough to cheat on these tests, anyway.  Want to be less implicitly racist?  Take the test again and just shoot more of the preppy white guys this time around.  I mean, come on.  If you're going to not be implicitly racist, you'll need a strategy.

That's the thing about these tests.  Their mechanisms of discovering not just unconscious bias, but unconscious malice show a clumsy bias in the way we attribute such malice to ourselves and others.  I do not, in point of fact, go around making split decisions to shoot people.  Most of the time I forget my gun on my way out the door in the morning and have to turn back halfway to work to get it.  And that's sometimes a whole half hour of shooting people after looking at them for approximately a second that's down the drain.  That's, like, 1800 people I could have shot!  Bummer!

The Harvard Test uses word- ( Good = Joy, Love, Peace, Wonderful, Pleasure, Glorious, Laughter, Happy — and Bad = Agony, Terrible, Horrible, Nasty, Evil, Awful, Failure, Hurt) and picture-association (black and white faces) — and reflexes, of course (which raises the question of whether you're more of a racist before or after your morning Grande Triple Soy Caramel Macchiato, but that's for another time) — to determine how despicable you really are beneath that flimsy veneer of civility...


The tests themselves are testaments to our inability to come to terms with the alienation endemic to our particular time and place.  Our dialogue on racism seems only to provide us with ever more tools to unearth new sources of it, with new names, and new opportunities to admit and atone for it. 

Kristoff is an admirable soul, his self-reflection and ceaseless advocacy represent the better angels of our nature, even if there will always be a whiff of "white man's burden" there.  And there are definitely times some poignant simplicity pokes through his nuanced cogitations, as when he uses the phrase "in evolutionary times," as if evolution were some distant era and not an ongoing process.

Similarly, his alarm at the idea that many Americans (including African-Americans) have been found in a recent study to associate the word "American" with white Americans.  Could this have something to do with our now common practice of proudly tacking an ethnic qualifier onto every kind of "American" except white Americans?  Sure, this reflects a historical differentiation based on distinctions between dominant and minority cultures in our country, but it's been adopted all along the political spectrum.  I can imagine some folks thinking they were dealing with a trick question here.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm all for examining on a personal level our means of differentiating and categorizing groups.  I'm all for the social necessity of expunging institutional racism, and moving consciously toward an embrace of real diversity in our lives.  It's never too late.  These are still "evolutionary times," after all.  But I'm a little afraid that where we are in our vaunted "national dialogue on race" is a dead-end of pseudo-self-discovery and self-accusation leading to meaningless attribution of subconscious malice. 

The incessant viewing of racial difference through the prism of malice and the self-indulgent guilt implicit in its "discovery" by those in the dominant group is part of our cultural complex, and it contains within it the paradoxes that have defined the dominant culture — ideas like original sin and questions of natural versus social identity that are constitutive of the culture itself. 

We clearly have no idea how to reconcile the paradox of natural and social man, how to merge equality and difference.  Michael Ignatieff captures the fundamental paradox in The Needs of Strangers...

...we recognize our mutual humanity in our differences, in our individuality, in our history, in the faithful discharge of our particular culture of obligations.  There is no identity we can recognize in our universality.  There is no such thing as love of the human race, only love of this person or that, in this time and not in any other...

Race and culture in our place and time are very obviously entwined, and our judgments, however many milliseconds it takes us to make them, are more complex than the current rhetoric on racism allows.  We can't acknowledge the richness of our differences if we can't acknowledge our differences.  And that it's OK to be fascinated, frightened, excited and annoyed by them.

Oh, and that it's probably best to leave the guns at home.