A Nation of Cowards

Richard Spencer on Eric Holder's most charitable and profound remark:

It’s so true. Throughout my years of formal education, I haven’t heard much about “race” or “racism” and its effects on American society. It’s always seemed that the whole educational and governmental elite just wanted to ignore the subject entirely. One would think that in a country this size, with our great wealth and resources, we’d have full academic departments dedicated to the study of race, as well as student-orientation sessions and wings of the university bureaucracy. A nation that was willing to talk about matters racial would probably be willing to spend billions on government programs dedicated to equalizing outcomes in employment, admissions, and test taking. It’s not hard to imagine that a really, really racially aware nation might be periodically blessed with presidential candidates who propose a national conversation about race and offer their candidacy as a means of confronting, and perhaps even overcoming, this hypothetical nation’s racial past.

Bereft as we are of all racial discourse, one would suspect that the academic and media elite would welcome with open arms all viewpoints on race in the biological and social sciences. But instead, it’s the same old story—cowardly avoidance.

Well said. In all my years as a college student, I never once heard students or professors discuss race. My history professor did not spend half the semester talking about the history of racism in America, nor did I ever receive multiple e-mails from the race-oriented Pacific-Asian Society asking that I join its group, despite my repeated requests to be removed from its e-list, just like I have never heard race discussed as a topic in today's music, literature, or film. Cowards, the lot of us.