Dear Commentariat: Please Shut Up

I refer, of course, to Gatesgate. Not having been on the porch in question, I won't comment on the rights and wrongs of that. Cops probably shouldn't arrest people in their homes if they're not committing any crimes there, I suppose. On the other hand, yelling at cops rarely produces a good result and personally I avoid it. Beyond that, as I say, I wasn't there.

But I distinctly remember rolling my eyes when a few fatuous commentators ventured to say, after Barack Obama was elected president, that the United States was now a "postracial" society. There's a certain symbolism to the presidency, of course. But the fact that a nonwhite achiever attains some high position doesn't necessarily mean that most people in a society have suddenly become blind to the fact of race. If it did, you could pick any number of dates and say that was when the U.S. became "postracial"—1947, when Jackie Robinson started playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, comes to mind. But the United States didn't become postracial in 1947 and it didn't become postracial in 2008 or 2009. I think what happened is that some columnists had a deadline and nothing much to say. So suddenly we were supposedly postracial. But really, we weren't.

I live in the state of Pennsylvania. Lived here all my life, it's part of me. Love it, if you want to put it that way. Now, here in Pennsylvania we have a broad swathe of the Appalachian Mountains curving through the middle of the state and I've spent some time there catching trout and whatnot. People who know the area call the state "Pennsyltucky" for a joke. I remember looking at a county-by-county breakdown of election results the night they had the Democratic primary here. The Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and State College areas went for Obama. In Pennsyltucky they went very, very solidly for Hillary Clinton. I was struck by this because I had never before noticed rural Pennsylvanians being all that wild about Hillary Clinton. Was rural Pennsylvania an unsuspected bastion of postsexism? I really have no idea. But at least I'm willing to say so. The people who claimed we were postracial—well, let's just say you need to get out more, gang.