By Dennis Holt
Senior Editor

We, the press, are at it again: treading all too lightly, putting a telescope up to a blind eye, pretending that what is happening isn’t.

We are not admitting that brazen racism is front and center in our body politic, and will be so for some unknown time. And the only way to dampen and depress that ardor is to identify it, isolate it, and shame it. No new laws or court decisions will help this time.

Racism is here because the President of the United States is black. A lady at one of the health forums pleaded that “I want my country back.� Most of us know what that means.

I lived in the South for seven informative years. I have seen racial anger close up and have known what it looks like for over 50 years. It’s back in the newspapers and TV right now, not old pictures of a George Wallace supporter — �segregation today, segregation forever —� but in brand new, quite ugly images.

There is something about racial fury that brings out the physical worst on the faces of angry whites, unlike any other source of anger.

The re-emergence of bald racism shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. For one thing, that kind of emotion dies hard and is easy to pass on. And it was demonstrated in the 2008 election.

Two days after the election, the New York Times printed a fascinating map that showed, in typical red or blue, which parts of the country voted more Democratic than in 2004 (blue) and which parts voted more Republican (red). Most of the map was blue.

But there was a red swath through the South that looked like the image of Appalachia. Most of the red was in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisinia, Oklahoma and the panhandle of Florida. This is a solidly poor white area, and in large measure it is poor whites we are hearing from.

But the press largely hasn’t talked about this. It’s there and it isn’t going to go away by itself. David Carr had a column in the Monday NY Times talking about “taming the debate.� But he didn’t mention racism at all; most of his focus was on changes in the media.

For example, he said, “But that was before the consumer Web took hold, before Fox News, before MSNBC, before a media ecosystem blossomed that amplified every debate into a frantic broadcast scrum.�

And later, “In part the outrage and hyperbole work because the mainstream media, insecure about their own status in an atomizing world play into the stream of split screan coverage...�

Well, all this is true, but does not throw light on why so many people seem to have gone crackers. The latest example of Obama’s school speech is a case in point.

But the press, or some of it, must come to grips with this cold reality, expose it, and talk about it. It’s here and we can’t pretend it isn’t.

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