Attorney General Holder On Race: We Are a "Nation of Cowards"

Didn't we just elect a Black President? I thought this was supposed to a new Hopeychangey "post racial" United States.

Didn't The One's Greatest Racial Speech Of All Time end all this?

Maybe Mr. Holder should worry about cleaning up his track record first.

The Politico reports:

Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that despite advances, the United States remains “a nation of cowards” on issues involving race.

“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, a nation of cowards,” Holder said in remarks to his staff in honor of Black History Month.

His comments appear on a transcript provided by the Justice Department.

“Even as we fight a war against terrorism; deal with the reality of electing an African-American, for the first time, as the president of the United States; and deal with other significant issues of the day, the need to confront our racial past and to understand our racial present, and to understand the history of African people in this country — that all endures,” the attorney general added.

“Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”

B-b-but Attorney General Holder, haven't you heard that some of White America's best friends are black? No, seriously, they even tell pollsters about it!

ABC News polls show there has been sharply increased social interaction between black and white Americans in the past few decades. In June, 79 percent of whites reported having a "fairly close personal friend" who's black, up from 54 percent in 1981. Ninety-two percent of blacks reported having a white friend, up from 69 percent a generation ago.


Similarly, a 2005 poll found that 48 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks said someone in their family had brought a friend of the other race home for dinner — also far higher than when the data series began in 1973.