Kramer? I Barely Know Her

So the Michael Richards outburst has led me to think a lot about race in the United States. I have a lot to say, but for now I'll just make a quick observation. We have a repugnant history of racism. Luckily, most of us recognize it as repugnant, and we want to build a better and more just society. To a large extent we have succeeded. It's a strange society that we've ended up with, though. Explicit expressions of racism are almost universally condemned, and condemned furiously. Meanwhile huge disparities in income, life expectancy, educational achievement, etc. are not only tolerated, they largely pass unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon. So we live in a society where race is hugely relevant to your life prospects, but where expressions of racism count for more than the experience of suffering because of your race. It's a bizarre outcome, one that I'll try to explain in the future (I suspect it's just the predictable result of a society of self-interested individuals who care more about seeming not to be racist than they do about addressing racial injustice).