Is Obama’s Silence on Race Golden?

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Gary Kamiya, at Salon, thinks so and I agree. Obama has said virtually nothing about race in his first 100 days and I, for one, am glad he both chose not to and wasn’t forced to by events. The simple existence of that magical family in the White House, with all our sappiness about Michelle’s clothes and the new puppy, has given us all a chance to exhale. It’s given us all a chance to be hopeful that we really are on the path, however potholed, to color blindness.

New poll data show that:

“two-thirds of Americans now say race relations are generally good, and the percentage of blacks who say so has doubled since last July… .”

Big, big improvement. Follow up interviews make it plain that Obama is the reason Americans have gone all kumbayah. But Kamiya gets it right when he muses that:

…it also seems to me that a big part of the reason that Americans are feeling better about race is because of how Obama has handled the subject — or rather, not handled it. Obama has assiduously avoided the subject of race. His silence has allowed his actions and character to take center stage, rather than the color of his skin. We are a country used to talking endlessly about race but not doing anything about it. Obama is doing exactly the opposite. He is not talking about race, but that very fact, combined with his high popularity, has advanced racial harmony more than any utterance could do. His silence sends exactly the right message, the message preached by Jesus, Martin Luther King and every other apostle of human equality: The accidents of race, ethnicity gender and class do not define us.

It’s maddening that minorities are still forced to go on reassuring whites that, once in power, we don’t immediately don dashikis and commence to getting even. It’s also necessary. No doubt Obama will smack headfirst into race before much longer. Here’s hoping his instincts remain as finely honed when he does.

(And when he is ready ‘to go there,’ I vote for this symbolic act.)

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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