Soft bigotry of a double standard for black bigotry

James Taranto:

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The Obama-Wright imbroglio is laying bare the racial double standard in America. The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof hints at this but doesn't quite get the point:

To whites, for example, it has been shocking to hear Mr. Wright suggest that the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people.

That may be an absurd view in white circles, but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African-Americans believed this was at least plausible.

"That's a real standard belief," noted Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a political scientist at Princeton (and former member of Trinity church, when she lived in Chicago). "One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme. When if you've spent time in black communities, they are not shared by everyone, but they are pretty common beliefs." . . .

Many African-Americans even believe that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods.

Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives.

What's happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation--and they are thunderstruck.

All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is painful, awkward and essential. And that dialogue needs to focus not on clips from old sermons by Mr. Wright but on far more urgent challenges--for example, that about half of black males do not graduate from high school with their class.

What it really demonstrates is that whereas whites are expected to be respectful, sensitive and fair-minded when talking with or about blacks, there is little expectation that blacks will reciprocate--to the point that a black presidential candidate doesn't feel inhibited from making a statement about "a typical white person."

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You do blacks no favor by ignoring their ignorant statements about factual matters where they are not just dead wrong. These statements reflect the scapegoating of bigots and because they are spoken by blacks no one is bothering to correct them. Allowing them to wallow in their bigotry and prejudice does them no favor. What is troubling about Kristof's presentation is that he does not bother to correct these obvious factual errors.