"Race: Still Too Hot to Touch".

Race: Still Too Hot to Touch
By MATT BAI

If Tom Wolfe had set out to write a “Bonfire of the Vanities” on modern Washington, a farce about lives and races colliding, he couldn’t have done much better than to invent the unlikely story of Shirley Sherrod.

An African-American bureaucrat in the Georgia office of the Agriculture Department, Ms. Sherrod became an instant celebrity last week because of a speech she gave to a N.A.A.C.P. convention in March in which she explained the evolution of her attitudes on race. A conservative blogger triumphantly circulated an edited clip in which Ms. Sherrod seemed to suggest that she had declined to help a white farmer in need of aid. (She hadn’t, to which the farmer attested.) From there, Ms. Sherrod was renounced by a jittery N.A.A.C.P., exploited by right-wing commentators, and fired and then unfired from her job, before at last receiving a conciliatory call from the president of the United States.

In many ways, Ms. Sherrod’s ordeal followed a depressingly familiar pattern in American life, in which anyone who even tries to talk about race risks public outrage and humiliation.

We might have hoped that the election of a black president would somehow make the subject less sensitive and volatile, in the way that John F. Kennedy’s election seemed to allay the last, lingering tension between American Catholics and the country’s Protestant establishment. But as the week’s events made clear, Mr. Obama’s presence alone isn’t going to deliver us from a racial dialogue characterized by cable-TV conflagration — and it may even complicate the conversation.

If Mr. Obama’s campaign was about “hope,” then it was, in some part, the hope for a more nuanced kind of dialogue. A telling moment was in 2007 when then-Senator Joe Biden, in summarizing Mr. Obama’s appeal as an African-American, condescendingly described him as “clean” and “articulate.” It was the kind of comment that at another time, with another black leader, might have led to Mr. Biden’s undoing.

Instead, Mr. Obama shrugged the whole thing off, saying no apology was needed. The next year, he chose Mr. Biden as his running mate.

In this way, Mr. Obama seemed to signal a new paradigm for black-white discussion — one in which a public figure could use language outside the defined limits of acceptability and expect to be judged in some larger context. In other words, the promise of Mr. Obama’s candidacy wasn’t a post-racial society where no one was going to notice the color of your skin; it was a society where you could talk about race — no matter what color you were — without automatically being called a racist.

And yet any hope that Mr. Obama’s election might magically erase the tension of recent decades has faded, as the N.A.A.C.P. and the Tea Party traded accusations over race. Black leaders have discovered that you still can’t raise legitimate questions about racism without being accused of “playing the race card.” And a large element of the Tea Party movement that is simply angered over government spending finds that in much of the public’s mind, it is still linked to its most extreme, antebellum elements.

And then there is the case of Ms. Sherrod, which seemed to bring together all the familiar elements of racial dysfunction in the society: bigotry and hypersensitivity, gross distortions and moralizing.

In some ways, Mr. Obama’s election seems to have further confused the conversation. Some white conservatives may be in no mood to feel contrite about the nation’s racial legacy now that a black man is sitting in the Oval Office. Civil rights groups, meanwhile, are struggling with the question of how to fight racism in a nation led by a president with an African last name.

Al Sharpton, who considers himself a black leader of Mr. Obama’s generation, has made the case that many of his older colleagues are preoccupied with protesters in the Tea Party and not focused enough on the opportunities that come with governing. “Some people are just used to fighting the power, rather than using the power to win,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview. “You don’t get control of the White House and two governors and the Justice Department, and then start arguing with people carrying signs.”

Why haven’t we moved beyond the old, stultifying debate in the age of Obama?

One reason may be that Mr. Obama himself tries to avoid discoursing on the issue, in the way that Bill Clinton relished. The president is mired in a miserable economy that is endangering his party’s hold on power; White House aides don’t want him to appear distracted by a debate that may seem superfluous to many Americans. And to those aides, perhaps, Mr. Obama’s appeal among white voters as a biracial politician has been helped by the fact that he doesn’t talk much about it.

Before he entered political life, of course, Mr. Obama wrote expansively about his racial identity in a memoir. As a candidate for president, beset by controversy over the race-infused comments of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Mr. Obama delivered a less personal but deeply thoughtful speech about the racial grudges and suppositions that permeated the two cultures, white and black, into which he was born.

As president, however, Mr. Obama’s instinct, much to the irritation of older black leaders, has been to avoid any lengthy discussion of racial identity or animus. (It was Mr. Biden, and not the president, who spoke for both men when he said recently that they did not consider the Tea Party movement to be grounded in racism.)

President Obama did comment tartly on the arrest of his friend Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and then held the famous “beer summit” in the Rose Garden. Inside the White House, however, Mr. Obama’s foray into that debate, while trying to focus public attention on health care reform, was considered a calamitous mistake.

Perhaps the president’s reluctance reflects the particular perils faced by any president who represents an American minority — the reasonable fear that he will be perceived, however unfairly, as chauvinist or parochial.

The historian Robert Dallek, a biographer of John F. Kennedy, posits that whatever effect Mr. Kennedy might have had on American attitudes about Catholicism was cemented not by his election in 1960, but by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It wasn’t until that moment, Mr. Dallek says, when Mr. Kennedy proved that he could be relied on to protect the national interest as a whole — a judgment that extended, perhaps, to American Catholics generally.

Looked at this way, perhaps Mr. Obama is not just a president in the thrall of economic crisis, but a black leader in search of his defining moment, as well. The conflagrations continue, while we wait.