Holder calls for honest talk on race

Last  week, Attorney General Eric Holder made a controversial speech at a Department of Justice Black History Month event. The controversy over this speech is a bit puzzling to me. In brief, Holder said that for all of the progress  Americans have made in civil rights and race relations, racism still has a deep influence on US society.  Places of  business have become integrated,  but  socially, we still live in a segregated society. In order to get past that, Americans need to learn to talk about race honestly across racial lines, and so far  we have not  been  able to do that.

At least, this is my understanding after having read the entire speech online.  (Thanks to Think Progress for the link to the speech. They also have a link to a video of the speech, which I haven't watched yet.)

There are several points of that speech that I might like to argue about with Mr. Holder. I think that  there are many issues that US citizens are not able to discuss honestly--not only race, but also class, gender, and the ways that the patriarchal family structure sets most of us up to be exploited and abused. Also, in reading the speech,  it looked perhaps as if Holder thought that race relations in the US were simply a matter of black and white--but racist oppression has also taken place and continues to take place against American Indians,  Lationos and Latinas, Asian people, and people of Middle Eastern descent.

Finally, I think the problem of racism in the United States in not just about the bigotry of individual white people, or about the difficulty US citizens have in communicating across racial boundaries.  I think there is such a thing as institutional racism, and until that is eliminated, we're not going to make much more progress.

I've greatly oversimplified this post, and hope to discuss these issues in much more depth in the future.  The  main point that I'm trying to make that there might be a number of points in Eric Holder's speech that are open to discussion. But it's not fair for everyone to get their knickers in a twist because one sentence has been taken out of context. Read  the whole thing. Then we can talk.