Prometheus 6

“Ideally, you want to punch back right to the solar plexus,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist. “But when race gets injected, given the 200-year history of this country, it is really fraught with peril.” 

Injection implies that, after a pure start, race was found deep beneath the surface of things like some sort of abscess. But let's be real.

Not to reignite any smoldering embers but we just went through several months of explicitly race-based appeals to ethnic whites in the Democratic primaries. And don't play like Hillary was the only one making them, either. She was just the one using Southern Strategy tactics.

That sort of stuff is like farting in an elevator. You can't take it back.

More fundamentally, we ARE talking about a society in which race was a central organizing factor, economically and socially and therefore politically, since literally before day one. If you have a national scale discussion with no reference to race, it's because you've screened it out.