Something struck me the other day at an Obama house party as I heard people going around the room, explaining why they support Barack, and in so doing obeying the culture of his campaign and delicately dancing around the subject of race.

The ideal of being color-blind is a joke. No one does it because no one can.

You are a racist, and so are the rest of us, black, white, brown, or rainbow colored. In every society I've encountered on this planet, its impossible to NOT take race into account when making judgments about someone.

The irony of our conversation on race is that the ultimate insult, to be called a racist, applies to everyone. Often the most up front racists are not white. Why? Because a world in which you face racial discrimination every day makes no sense unless you incorporate race deeply into your outlook. Otherwise you blame yourself for other people's criticism of you.

The ideal of color-blindness comes from white folks who can't, or won't, understand their own racism. White folks have the luxury of not incorporating race as deeply into their world-view. They don't have to. The "skin-privilege" of whiteness means they generally do not suffer as a result of racial discrimination. So with race on the back burner in their day to day routine they can pat themselves on the back for not thinking about race, except to fantasize about a color-blind world in which no one takes race into account. Meanwhile what happens when a black man knocks on their door after dinner needing to use the phone?

The real question is not "Am I a racist?" The real question is "How am I racist?" What are my assumptions about race doing to the world around me? Are they based on a desire to keep people down? Knock others off their privileged pedestal? Achieve retribution for past abuses? Are they the result of simply trying to navigate through a complex world full of racist assumptions? There are infinite varieties of racism, but the important distinction to make between them is how they constrain human aspiration.

The violence, desperation, and hopelessness that our racism creates cannot be reduced by longing for a color-blind fantasy world. We need to get into the nitty-gritty. We need to get used to talking about our racist assumptions and get beyond making ourselves and others feel awful for having them.

I'll start the process by admitting to a few of my own. When I see a black teenage boy with his pants riding five inches below his butt crack (though thankfully the boxers are always covering the crack which is more than I can say about some of my white friends), there is a voice that goes off saying something like "this kid probably doesn't give a shit about what I think, so why should I care what he thinks". When I hear Jesse Jackson talking about cutting Obama's nuts off for "talking down to black people" about absent fathers, and then I come to find out that Jackson himself has an "outside child" who he has only recently acknowledged, well...the racial stereotypes that leap to mind are not something I'm proud of. But they are there and I've got to own them. Dig into them. See what they reveal about me. And they pretty much reveal a middle class white guy, who has some issues about emotionally absent fathers, who barely understands the world of African-Americans, who has an annoying tendency to pat himself on the back for broad-mindedness while ignoring his own ignorance and reliance on easy stereotypes.

But talking about race is very hard to do, in no small part because we have criminalized racism. It should be a crime to deny someone an opportunity because of their race. But we need safe places to talk about race and our racism. And indeed we have one, right here.

I think Knoxviews and blogs like it are a great place for us to talk about race. Anonymity, the absence of physical confrontation, the opportunity to carefully craft a statement, the chance for immediate feedback, the ability to go back and see exactly what was said. We should take this opportunity to dig into racism. The insanity of our present conversation on race shows how badly we need to.

Thanks