It's been said more than once by a lot of different people: 'The problem with Americans is that they have not really started to talk about racism.' It seems a patently idiotic thing to say given all the media attention 'race issues' receive in this country - the O.J. Simpson verdict, Susan Smith alleging that a black man killed her children, the Million Man March and Louis Farrakhan, Colin Powell and his non-bid for office, Affirmative Action and so on and on. Anyone would think that Americans talk about race all the time: the truth is that Americans, both black and white, talk a lot around the race issue but are constantly trying to avoid dealing intimately with it.

LRB 8 February 1996 | PDF Download