I confess...

...that I agree with the main point of William Kristol's latest column. It happens. I probably don't agree with the policy ideas that brought him to it, but that's another story.

As Kristol's article shows, a nationwide "conversation about race" sounds harmless enough, but presents some dangers. Much like repeatedly classifying voters by imagined racially-defined voting blocs, an America-wide discussion of race is bound to make the category matter more, not less, in the minds of Americans.

To deal with race is to deal with something that a) we all know matters in terms of how people experience society, and b) we all know should not. The American approach has been to focus on (a) and discuss race head-on, while the French one was, and to an extent I suppose is, to focus on (b), on willing a world in which race doesn't matter into existence by ignoring the category entirely. Both models have their flaws, but I sympathize more with the French model. Not out of Francophilia (mine tends not to extend to politics) but out of an understanding that classifying humans as though we were dogs (note the French vocabulary for describing pure-breds) is a poor response to racists whose impulse is to do just that.

Granted ignoring race altogether will have reached an extreme if race becomes so taboo that racism cannot be identified as such. However, the way to counter racism isn't to create positive definitions of race, to be proud of one's "race," but to fight racism while having a positive view of one's own culture(s). Obviously black American culture, like Jewish American culture, has been shaped by externally-imposed (and at times internally agreed-upon) definitions of the group as a "race." But for once, let us admit that we are all human, and use words to positively describe our differences that keep that commonality in mind. When the racists toss you "race," you should toss back "culture," "community," or anything else that suggests you and those like you are more than the sum of your shared DNA.