This may sound funny coming from me but, I sometimes get tired of the call to discuss race after some big racial blowup occurs. In my lifetime, I have seen this call being made after things like the Rodney King incident and subsequent L.A. riots, during the O.J. Simpson trial and verdict, the Abner Louima assault, the Amadou Diallo killing, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that, for longer than I have been alive, there has been a call to “start” the dialogue on race. At this point, my cynicism says that no substantive discussion on race is going to occur any time soon.

Now, in light of the Michael “Kramer” Richards racist outburst, calls are coming from many corners to “talk about race”.

So, while I appreciate the call, I have to say that I fear that common-sense desires to have a real national discussion on race will still go unfulfilled. However, one did catch my eye so, I’ll highlight it.

If you’re just back from Thanksgiving in Antarctica, let me be the first to tell you that Michael Richards, the actor best known as Cosmo Kramer from “Seinfeld,” let loose a racist tirade on a couple of hecklers at the Laugh Factory in L.A. two Fridays ago. If, like me, you’ve watched this story from the beginning (and really, how could you not—it swept TomKat’s wedding right off the 24-hour-news screens and dominated the blogosphere), then you already know that the spin cycle has begun. Richards apologized on “Letterman,” hired a top PR man and apologized again, this time to the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. By the time you read this, he’ll probably have been booked on “Oprah” or “Good Morning America.” Perhaps he’ll have positioned himself as a victim and checked into rehab. Forgive my cynicism, but we’re in a well-worn groove here.

I was not shocked by Richards’s outburst, and I don’t believe many other African-Americans were, either. We know racism exists both from our own experiences and from the world around us. In California, Mel Gibson was caught in a drunken anti-Semitic rant during a police stop just four months ago. In Virginia, George Allen helped the Republicans lose the Senate when he called one of his opponent’s staffers—a young volunteer of Indian descent—a “macaca,” which is a genus of monkey and is considered by many to be a racial slur. In Tennessee, an anti-Harold Ford Jr. ad featuring a blonde white woman leeringly saying “Harold, call me” was widely seen as racist.

The sweeping story of race in America is, to say the very least, not a happy one. The politics of black and white really began nearly 400 years ago, when, in 1619, Virginia settlers took delivery of slaves from a Dutch man-of-war. In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln, who did not run as an abolitionist, barely won the presidency, America had 4 million slaves. A century later the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts finally defeated Jim Crow—or at least got the Jim Crow laws off the books. Hearts were (and are) another matter. In 1992, L.A. burned; two weeks ago Michigan voted to ban affirmative action in public employment and in education and state contracts.

Read on and take it in. But, I am afraid that more effort went into the writing of this piece than will go into us, as a nation, addressing the issue.

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