Time to be Bored With Race

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

Time to be bored with race
July 22, 2010 - by Roger L Simon


I have noticed of late that the moment someone starts talking about race, whether in person or, even more so, on television, my mind wanders and I start to feel very sleepy. It’s almost hypnotic, as if someone had just slipped a triple dose of those time-release Ambien capsules into a cup of Sleepy Time tea and poured it down my unsuspecting throat. Soon my eyes are beginning to close… No more race…. No more race…. You are very sleepy…

And then my eyes are shut.

If I hear one more reference to Shirley Sherrod’s video, I think I will turn into Rip Van Winkle. Wake me up when it’s over. Even if it takes twenty years.

Am I the only one who is feeling this way? I don’t think so. In fact I rather suspect I am in a majority. If there’s one thing most of us don’t want to hear about now, whatever color we are, it’s race.

Eric Holder had it all wrong (as he does about a fair number of things these days) when he said we don’t have the courage to talk about race. It’s the reverse. We don’t have the courage to NOT talk about it.

Like monks at a Zen monastery told by their abbot to STFU until further notice, we need nothing more than a solid dose of enforced silence about race. The minute we mention the “R” word we should be clapped on the back by the abott’s hardwood stick and made to sit endless hours in the lotus position — without a cushion.

There is another way to look at it: Years ago I heard about a treatment used by French psychiatrists to circumvent decades of painstaking and overpriced psychoanalysis. They would put highly troubled neurotics in the hospital and, instead of giving them the “talking cure” or some other treatment, they would just make them go to sleep for two weeks. (I’m not sure that was the precise length, but you get the idea.) When they awoke they would be all better (or close).

That’s the way I feel about race.

I know this sounds a tad sarcastic but actually I think it’s true. The best way to deal with America’s race problem at this precise moment in history is to shut up about it. Everybody. Including me.