Attorney General Eric Holder's comments last week about cowardice when it comes to discussing race garnered just condemnation from all quarters.  Even pundits like Jeff Jacoby got it right this time. Steven Colbert's reaction was my favorite.  To demonstrate how scary the topic of race was, but that he was no coward, Colbert invited an African American on, who then proceeded to place several live tarantulas on the host's body and head while the latter asked his guest questions like "so, what's it like to be black?"

The problem with the stalled dialogue on race in America Obama urged us to embark on in his famous speech is that it's like a marriage where it's implicitly understood that only one party can bring up the topic, but that one party also uses the fact to castigate the other party for not doing so more often.  This is because the dialogue on race is a one-way street.  And it happens to be one that, while it intersects other streets — topics of education, privilege, income — it ultimately leads to a cul de sac. 

I wondered months ago, in the thick of the campaign, what a National Dialogue on Race would look like.  But so far, no one's come up with a template for a fruitful dialogue, and I suspect that's because nothing fruitful will come out of reiterating a history we all know, and that all reasonable, right-thinking folks feel remorse and shame for. 

If a dialogue on race is to be yet another iteration of empty apologies for a history that can't be undone, it won't be fruitful, will it?  It not only allows one party to cling to it's old wounds at a time of unprecedented possibility for building a new political and cultural paradigm, it demands that the other party supply the salt for its wounds. 

The dialogue we need to have is much more expansive.  It encompasses both the nation's history of injustice — including, vitally, speaking frankly about the origins of inequality and the mechanisms of power that enable and perpetuate it — and our extraordinary legacy of uniting to overcome it. 

Race is not the fundamental issue in this much-needed discussion, and it is clinging to the concept of racial injustice as the supreme injustice that is shortsighted and cowardly.  Anything we use to justify cataloging and characterizing a "class" of humans as somehow less than human, whether for the purpose of using them, abusing them, or eliminating them altogether, diminishes without qualification our own humanity. 

Certainly, we need to try to understand the particular histories and peculiar ironies of injustice in America, but we also need to recognize that the goal is not to codify a hierarchy of injustices, as when black leaders like Jesse Jackson belittle gay rights, justifying support of Prop 8 in their communities, or suggest that America's "black genocide" was worse than the Holocaust*, as if both crimes weren't wholly evil.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

The brilliance and profundity of these words is that while they have a particular resonance to African Americans in their historic struggle for civil rights, they are also universal. King remains a towering moral leader precisely because he recognized the universality of the struggle for human dignity.  

The fruitful dialogue we need to be having has to do with dignifying human differences, coming together to explore real ways in which we can build a future in which there is no "hierarchy of equality," in which, as King put, "justice is indivisible."
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*which I wrote about here.