DougJ points us to a couple of good articles on the conversation going on about race as a result of President Carter’s comments on the subject.

First, Joe Klein gives us a good summary of what’s driving ignorant white southerners (i.e, the GOP) nuts:

[T]hey are freaked by an amorphous feeling that they America they imagined they were living in–Sarah Palin’s fantasy America–is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals…to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks…

Barack Obama is the apotheosis of all they fear. He is a child of what used to be called miscegenation–a mixed marriage. His father was a Muslim, his mother was sort of a hippy. She raised him in Hawaii, which is just barely American and in Indonesia (which is very suspicious). He is a liberal (even if a prohibitively moderate one). Worse, he’s a completely urban sort. There is nothing resembling a log cabin in his background. We’ve had elite Presidents–the Roosevelts, the Bushes–but we have never really had an urban one. (New York Governor Al Smith, Tammany Hall’s finest, was trounced in 1928–the last pure urban candidate.) This sort of populist paranoia is disgraceful, but as American as apple pie.

Ta-Nahisi Coates opines that Obama’s refusal to play the role of minstrel or house negro is driving these people batty:

Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance. He tells kids to study–and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness–and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date–and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West–the way he says, “He’s a jackass.” He sounds like one of my brothers. And that’s the point, because that’s what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it’s driving them crazy.

As I’ve always said, racism is not just about running around calling people niggers. The majority of the racism that still exists in this country is in a much more subtle form and expresses itself as “discomfort” or “concern” about the “otherness” in other people that “just so happen” to be minorities (but it’s ok because my neighbor 14 houses down the block who I saw once at a bar-b-que is black).

Unfortunately, I still think that the only real solution to this is for time to go by and wait for the older racists to die off…