Here is an excerpt: 

The recent arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at his Cambridge home and the largely predictable public response that followed reminds me that what typically passes in our country for racial dialogue is so ... well, frustratingly narrow.

Many people of color (including Gates himself) have been shaking their heads saying, "I told you it was about race," while many whites have been rolling their eyes. One comment, responding to a Boston Globe article posted on boston.com, argued, "Enough of throwing down the race card ... we have a black president now, so that tired old ship has sailed."

Our national conversation on race gets stalled in a debate about race cards and whether a particular person such as an arresting police officer/diversity training instructor is a racist instead of talking about the broader patterns and the collective solutions.

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