This Sunday, Frank Rich reported some of the most exciting news that has appeared on the pages of the New York Times in a very long time. According to Rich, Americans are on the verge of transcending the racial and cultural rifts that divided them for centuries. There simply aren't "enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall," the former theater critic insisted. This statement is so inherently true that Rich did not even need to bolster it with actual statistical evidence.

Rich went on to announce that the rancorous street fights of the 1960's over militarism and civil rights have been neatly transmuted into "quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking." "The millennials' bottom-up digital superstructure," he wrote, has enabled economically marginalized ghetto dwellers and indignant campus radicals to air their grievances with the simple click of a button. So sit back in your Aeron chair, relax and blithely tend to your Facebook page.

"There is a heartening undertow," Rich assuredly declared. "We know the page will turn."

To support his confident prediction of a coming cultural utopia, and to make a larger point about the supposedly refreshing dynamics of the 2008 presidential campaign, Rich cited a Times report on protests in Harlem against the Sean Bell verdict. "This is not 1968," Rich claimed, "when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look (to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers, protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the 50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell."

Unlike Rich, and what seemed like the entire Times Metro desk, I attended the demonstration that erupted in Jamaica, Queens -- the neighborhood where Bell lived and died -- just hours after the verdict was announced. While this protest did not end violently, it was large, brimming with anger, and anything but restrained. At one point, I found myself in the midst of what seemed certain to become a brawl between a faction of furious protesters and a squadron of cops they had surrounded. It appeared from my vantage point that the cops retreated from the melee only because they were badly outnumbered.

But don't take me at my word. Watch the video I produced about the Sean Bell demonstrations, especially the latter half, which depicts the uncomfortable reality that Rich conveniently overlooked in his reductionist portrait of an imaginary post-racial America.

Comments (6)

1. Rich's utopian depiction of a post-racial US is heartwarming, but yet to be proved. The Obama national campaign will be a better test. How will the networks react to racist-appealing ads? Will they refuse racist ads the way they refuse antiwar ads critical of CheneyBush policies? I think we know the answer, and it ain't a postracial indicator.

   Posted by sloper at 05/12/2008 @ 05:14am

2. Mr Blumenthal, was the city "shut down" as Sharpton promised?

   And watching your video...the "Revolutinary Communist Party"?!?!?!?

   No, Mr Blumenthal, Rich is right. This is NOT 1968.

   Posted by Mask at 05/12/2008 @ 07:29am

3. The difficult thing in a progressive movement is always to maintain high hopes and low expectations at the same time.

   It's okay to try to give people hope - this is a large part of the whole Obama campaign. But it has to be done more carefully than Frank Rich has tried to do in the article quoted above. That article is likely to cause more anger than hope, because it uses the "restraint" of protesters as a measure of racial progress. Do we need a full-blown race riot to prove that racism still exists?

   Here's a homework assignment for Rich, for Blumenthal, or for somebody - find out how many White men have gotten mistakenly killed by the police with as many bullets as they pumped into Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo. Then find out in how many of these cases the police are completely exonerated afterward.

   Until somebody can demonstrate that this "happens just as often to White people too," I'll assume that racism of a very deadly kind still exists.

   Posted by JakobFabian at 05/12/2008 @ 07:34am

4. Frank Rich is an opinion columnist. He doesn't "report" or write "news" and you know it.

   Posted by marybretbrad

   i think the author of this article was being sarcastic.

   Posted by frosty zoom at 05/12/2008 @ 12:57pm

5. BTW, why is this article being "shunted" to 2nd Place?

   Started off this morning, top of the "Campaign '08" Blog. Now, Mr Nichols' "Edwards" article is back on top?

   Web error?....Nichols' ego?....or maybe they don't want it on the top?

   Posted by Mask at 05/12/2008 @ 1:01pm

6. anyhoo,

   things are getting better.

   in 198something i went to miami with "black" woman.

   wow.

   turn on the tv

   (after all "it" is who we are)

   now.

   ain't the same.

   cool.

   sure people are still doing really, really stupid things......

   and it's gonna take some time to rid our "dna" of this nonsense

   (like war, ¡so there!)

   but it's better.

   17,546,398 steps forward.....

   17,546,397 steps backward.....

   GO FORTH AND HYBRIDIZE!

   Posted by frosty zoom at 05/12/2008 @ 1:08pm