There is something unseemly about race natterers like Eugene Robinson or Jonathan Capehart pontificating from their sinecures at the Washington Post and MSNBC that, as Capehart put it in his column today, that the idea of a “post-racial society” is a “fallacy,” that all he wants for the new year “is the banishment of ‘post-racial’ anything from all social and political discourse. From its first utterance in 2008 to herald the rise of Barack Obama,” he pronounces, “the concept was misguided and delusional.”
It is not surprising, of course, that race natterers deny the very possibility, not to mention desirability, of a society where race does not matter. Does anyone believe Capehart would enjoy the benefits of his current platforms in a world where everyone was treated without regard to race? That’s not to say he’s not “qualified” to offer his opinions to print and TV audiences — after all, he’s no doubt the world’s leading authority on his opinions — just as it is not necessary to argue that most beneficiaries of racial preference in university admission are not “qualified” to attend the schools where they are admitted. True, those who would not have been admitted without the benefit of racial preference are less qualified than those who would have been admitted in their places, but that does not mean they are unqualified.
In any event the role qualifications should play in hiring pontificators is less clear than in admitting freshmen or hiring professors. Thus I think there is no contradiction or inconsistency in recognizing both that Capehart is qualified for his current positions but that in all likelihood he would not have gotten them in the racially neutral world to which he, from his own position, quite reasonably resists. There are no doubt many highly qualified young journalists — many, no doubt, even more highly qualified than Capehart — who were not hired by the Post or MSNBC, just as any selective university rejects large numbers of highly applicants.
