COMM 386: Conversation on race?

Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post hardly ever gives his opinion, but today he he gave his opinion that President-elect Barack Obama's victory means race "is no longer an issue" in presidential politics. Kurtz said:

His election does not eliminate racial prejudice in this country with a single stroke. Nor does it instantly improve the lot of many minorities. But it changes the way America views itself, somewhat to our collective surprise, and that is no small accomplishment.

Obama did not run as a racial candidate, in the manner of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, although occasionally he had to address race. A two-year campaign enabled America to get to know him and to judge him, against the competition, on the content of his character. He was right, though it brought accusations from the McCain campaign, that he does not look like the other presidents on dollar bills. But with a financial crisis looming, it's worth remembering that the color of those bills is green.

In the short term, at least, the country is feeling pretty good about itself ...

Kurtz quotes a number of pundits, who were out in full force today, to more or less the same effect.

A few sour notes were sounded (in my opinion), as when writing for New Republic, Alan Wolfe says, "The single most disturbing aspect of last night's election is the transformation of the Republican Party into the party of the Confederacy." Kurtz takes exception to this pronouncement:

This strikes me as unfair. I'm sure there are good old boys in the southern states who would not vote for a black candidate. But maybe millions of southerners decided John McCain was a more experienced nominee who better reflected their views. How can we just write them off as racists?

I'm just Southern enough to agree with Kurtz on this one.

In yesterday's column, sounded the same chords as he surveyed election night reaction.

But by and large, race hasn't been mentioned very much in this year's campaign coverage ... except as the "elephant in the room" that nobody wants to talk about.

One exception to that is Dawn Turner Trice, who began an interactive blog called "Exploring Race" in the spring after controversy over Obama's former pastor raised racial issues in a big way.

Trice, who is black, weighed in with a brief commentary headlined "Was this race a referendum on race?" Her answer: Not as much as she'd feared.

Trice's style on the blog is to raise questions and let the readers answer them. So the result is something like the national conversation about race that she, and others, hoped would occur when the uproar over the pastor was in the headlines. A lot of the time it reads like the discourse in any other electronic forum -- dogmatic, cranky and ill-thought-out -- but what Trice is attempting here is very interesting. Worth looking at.

I'll pose a question: How well do the media handle racial issues? How well does Trice's blog? Does the election analysis comprise a national conversation on race? (The term was President Bill Clinton's. He tried it in 1997 and didn't get very far with it. Can we have such a conversation now? Should we?