Flipping the script on race

A good start:

"The biggest challenges we face right now in improving race relations have to do with the universal concerns of Americans across color lines," [Obama] said. "If we are creating jobs throughout this economy, then African-Americans and Latinos, who are disproportionately unemployed, are going to be swept up in that rising tide."

"I think that more than anything is going to improve race relations," he said, "a sense of common purpose.''

The thing that I find so appealing about Obama on race is he spins the thing forward--he talks about it in a way that enrolls everyone in the sort of progressive agenda that will ultimately help black and brown people. It's rhetoric, I know, but it's important. The worst thing to happen to this ongoing conversation around race is the creation of a kind of zero-sum thinking. We debate over whether Affirmative Action takes jobs from hard-working whites. We argue over whether welfare allows lazy black women to leach off the system, or if lax crime policy leads to the rise of young superpredators.

Progressives need to stop fighting on their enemies' terrain. We need a paradigm that pitches our policies as in the self interest of all Americans. We have to start thinking of our drug laws as bad--not for black America--but for America. It may be true that the justice system is racist, but why are we fighting that battle? The bigger question is does it work? Are we comfortable being a world-leader in incarceration? How do we, as a country, want to allocate our resources. It can't be a matter of helping out the blacks--noble as that may be. I get the appeal toward social justice, and history. I just think it's a nonstarter. We have to argue from the perspective of patriotic self-interest, of doing what we need to do to compete in the world.