As separate as the five fingers

Atty General Eric Holder set off bells and sirens with his recent remarks concerning Americans' cowardice on race relations. Striking an astute balance between the trite NAACPesque unreachable brass ring---"we've achieved much but there's still a long road to haul"---Cornel West intellectual antagonism and the un-threatening house negro---Clarence Thomas---Mr Holder voiced what many not well-to-do blacks know as a reality and non-blacks relegate to yesteryear: social racism persists in America.

And why shouldn't the man speak thus? Because he's the first black U.S. Attorney General...because he's serving under the first black President...because he is obviously successful and articulate and, therefore, "not like the others"? If our Secretary of State can toss back beer and whiskey in Indiana---go Wabash!---and unequivocably propose to shoot down enemy aircraft then certainly Mr Holder has no cause to hold his tongue.


The racism he specifically pointed to concerns our willful segregation on social matters. While we work together and go to school together and pray together we still do not tend to play together, suggesting, perhaps, a preference to, as Booker T Washington lectured, remain as separate as the five fingers on a hand on all things social id est personal time, down time, recreation, weekends.

Americans making decisions to relocate themselves away from those they do not particularly care to be around is nothing revelatory. Freedom is mobility

To use a contemporary term, Americans are `clustering´ which is to say citizens are, if not visibly, unapologetically limiting their non-work hours to like-minded company. Last summer The Economist ("American Tribalism," June 21) wrote on the increasing clustering forming in the nation, referencing Bill Bishop's new book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart.


To advance that people have the freedom to associate and live with whomever they choose is a moot point. It does not require a college course in sociology to know people like being close to people more like themselves. Usually they call each other friends. For Mr Bishop and The Economist, the silent and subtle adverse effects, rather, show themselves to be none too silent or subtle when it comes to social discourse meaning co-workers (outside of think tanks) of opposing politics or tastes mindfully limit their chit-chat to weather, children's fevers, parking fees, weather---maybe this is why I find most people boring as handsoap---lest they butt heads and resort to shouting at each other like the overpaid, overexposed narrow-minded pundits they soak up from television.

the groupthink clustering spawns is alarming

Americans making conscious, pragmative decisions to relocate themselves away from those they do not particularly care to be around is nothing revelatory. Freedom is mobility. Those of alternative lifestyles cluster in San Francisco, West Hollywood, D.C. Some libertarians show a preference for rural, isolated mountainous regions while amoral, namby-pambies and wayward fashionistas find NYC fabulous. (NYC is not fabulous and I crave for the day it sinks to the bottom of the river.) It is hardly surprising, then, to observe conservatives segregating themselves with other conservatives and liberals with other liberals. But the groupthink clustering spawns is alarming, having kept half of the nation from remotely understanding how anyone could not vote for Bush while the rest of us, including other countries, fumed dumbfoundedly that anyone could vote for the Monkey---twice.

De facto segregation is less controversial when furthered by 'the people' than when it is maintained by a governmental body but, apparently, it is none the less detrimental.