Or, I could have just said this:

This never gets any better. Sorry, Joe: you're wrong on this issue. In your "good, honest liberal" mode, you intend to show everyone how un-racist you can be by declaring that "Race DOESN'T matter." However, here's the little secret:

It does and it doesn't.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter. Race doesn't determine intelligence, ability, health, wealth, status, size, or imagination. In a vacuum.

However, we do NOT live in a vacuum. Your ideas are purely academic in a practical world. Race DOES matter since it the founders of our social institutions made it matter. We HAVE to consider it as a factor--not to decide "who's better" but to figure out "what's really going on".

To declare that anyone with who declares a racial identity is bad... well, that's just foolish. Racial identity is, in my opinion, like race itself: neither good NOR bad. It's what you do with such concepts that matter. If you take the concept of racial identity and turn it against others in a feeling of superiority and then act on that, that is bad. But, if you take pride in your identity, racial or otherwise, and you do NOT use it to turn it against others... where's the problem?

--Grubi, who has his own blog, in a part of those identity discussions at OSP, demonstrating a brevity I seem to lack.

For the interested, this discussion is buzzing all over: Lots of OSPers have been talking. Obviously, Earl is, with two separate posts. Blunted on Reality hits it, too. And then there's all the suff I wrote.


You can find this mentioned at Nightcrawler, Sliver Rights, and S-Train. David at In Search of Utopia also has two different posts about it. Mac Diva discusses it at BlogCritics. It even a tangential mention from Uppity Negro in a post about Stephen Biko. My favorite is from Cobb, just one line with the title "Joe Steps in It." There's probably more, too.