A Diversity Cookie

Conor responds to last week's conversation. The best thing about his post is that he actually decided to try to contact the people Charles Blow went after. That said, given his response, I think I should be clear about what I initially objected to in Conor's post:

It's this kind of piece that causes people on the right to think that on matters of race, they're damned if they do, and they're damned if they don't -- if they don't make efforts to include non-whites they're unenlightened propagators of privilege, and if they do make those efforts they're the cynical managers of a minstrel show, but either way, race is used as a cudgel to discredit them in a way that would never be applied to a political movement on the left.

I agreed with Conor that Blow was over the line with the minstrel crack. But the specific point of disagreement is the notion that liberals bore any of the burden for the right throwing up their hands and saying, "Why even try?" My sense of these sorts of things is that if you find yourself protesting the fact that you're damned either way, you probably weren't very committed. In other words, if your doing this for a diversity cookie, then yes, you're damned either way. Of course, if you're trying to learn something, you're blessed either way.

Anyway, I don't want to say too much more. Conor is taking on, like, five of us right now. I'm going to try to politely back away.