IN RESPONSE to the fracas over underlying racial tensions in American politics currently underway between Jonathan Chait, Quin Hillyer, Ross Douthat, et al, here's a (not sufficiently) brief parable.

In 2000 I moved to the West African country of Togo for a few years, and it helped me figure some stuff out. While I lived there, I noticed that I, a white guy, was rarely feeling the sort of caution and anxiety during conversations with black people that I'd grown used to in America, particularly during my childhood in the highly segregated city of Washington, DC. To be more precise, I noticed consciously, not for the first time but certainly in a much clearer fashion, that I'd had this anxiety, now that I suddenly wasn't feeling it. 

It's not a huge anxiety. It sits in the background. It is impossible to pinpoint it. If you are an American, certainly an American of roughly my age, and you don't think you have this anxiety, it is very, very likely (though not impossible) that you are kidding yourself. There is a reason why they call it the "subconscious".

The reason why I wasn't feeling this anxiety in Togo surely stemmed largely from the lack of reservation with which Togolese approached me. There seemed to be a simplicity, a lack of status anxiety on either side, that hadn't existed in race relations in America. Or rather, obviously, there was a status anxiety embedded in race relations in America that was absent in Togo. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghana-born philosophy professor at Princeton, described this memorably in his book "In My Father's House": basically, he writes, the Africans he grew up among didn't share African-Americans' fraught relations towards whites because, within their countries, theirs was the dominant, governing ethnicity and culture. 

My sense is that Togolese, when they looked at me, didn't see someone with whom they'd have to engage in a wearisomely complicated, difficult-to-navigate dynamic over status or buried prejudice; they just saw some foreign guy. Of course there's a centuries-old dynamic of colonial and slave-trade-era interaction between West Africans and European whites, of course there are assumptions and attitudes involved, but somehow there was a basic unconscious understanding of social equality in conversations there that made for a very different atmosphere.

There is much, much less conversational and social racial tension in America now than there was 30 or 40 years ago. That's partly because white and black culture have grown together. It also owes much precisely to Americans' exquisite sensitivity to racial overtones in language and gesture; this is in contrast to many Europeans, who are currently having a miserable time because they haven't developed good radar for this kind of thing, and frequently find themselves offending each other with embarrassingly stupid stuff. But for me, at least, a member of Generation X, the tensions are still there, and it would be foolish and superficial to pretend they aren't. I noticed this immediately after I returned from Togo, when I was pitching a book about African cultural issues to an editor, a black guy a year or two younger than myself who'd grown up in New York, and found myself asking him where he'd gone to high school. He told me; it was a public competitive-admission magnet school, and I said, just looking for something to say in an awkward conversation, "Oh, right. That helps me place you."

It wasn't until at least an hour later that I suddenly thought, what the hell did I just say? "Place you?" What was going on in my mind, under the surface, being interviewed by a younger black man whose educational credentials were as good as mine, and who had the power to accept or reject my book proposal? It would be easy to shrug it off as an unfortunate connotation of an innocent use of "place", but like the use of "spook" in Philip Roth's "The Human Stain", it wasn't coincidence at all. I had wanted to "place" him because at some level I needed an explanation for the anomalous fact that the editor who was judging my book proposal was black. It took me hours to figure that out, and many months more to realise that I wasn't ready to write that book.

This is deep stuff. Deep, deep, deep. You don't know what's going on in your head. Don't pretend you do.

So. Two days ago, Jonathan Chait wrote a post critiquing a column in National Review Online by Quin Hillyer, in which Mr Hillyer wrote the following:
Every time decent people think the scandals and embarrassments circling Barack Obama will sink this presidency, we look up and see Obama still there — chin jutting out, countenance haughty, voice dripping with disdain for conservatives — utterly unembarrassed, utterly undeterred from any assertion of power he thinks he can get away with, tradition and propriety and the Constitution be damned. The man has no shame, no self-doubt, not a shred of humility, no sense that anybody else has legitimate reason to question him or hold any other point of view.
Mr Hillyer went on to berate the media for failing to "[trim] Obama's sails".
Mr Chait put the column in the context of his viewing of the film "12 Years a Slave" the night before, in which the black protagonist is mercilessly whipped after displaying a knowledge of engineering greater than that of his white overseer. He noted that Mr Hillyer is himself a sincere advocate of racial equality who was active in the early 1990s in the fight to stop the political rise of the white supremacist David Duke in the local Republican party. 

"His feeling of offense at Obama’s putative haughtiness ('chin jutting out') might be a long-ago-imbibed white southern upbringing bubbling to the surface, but more likely a flailing partisan rage that could just as easily have been directed at a white Democrat," Mr Chait wrote. "You can accept the most benign account of his thought process—and I do—while still being struck by the simple fact that Hillyer finds nothing uncomfortable at all about wrapping himself in a racist trope."

The best conservative replies to Mr Chait have come from Mr Douthatand Tim Carney, both of whom point out that if you want to engage someone in a conversation about racial issues, you don't start by comparing them to a slave owner, however implicitly. Both also go on to say that Mr Chait has a point: conservatives ought to be more wary about the kind of language they use in talking about Mr Obama. "Chait thinks that we should treat Obama differently because Obama is black. And he's right," Mr Carney writes.
It was stupid when liberals portrayed George W. Bush as a monkey. It would be worse to portray a black president as a monkey.
Racial sensitivity—modifying your behavior to take into account past racism for which you may bear no blame—is a virtue. We need more of it on the Right.
This is a welcome conclusion that could help to put this particular dispute to rest. It elides the deeper issue, though, which is the question of the extent to which racial anxieties themselves, and not merely language associated with them, actually drive antagonism to Mr Obama. I shared Mr Chait's reaction to Mr Hillyer's column: the list of actual policy complaints he presents against Mr Obama seems to me to range from the ho-hum ("contempt of court concerning offshore drilling") to the nonexistent or fantastical ("IRS harassment of conservative groups", Benghazi). 

Two items on the list, "New Black Panthers" and "Pigford-dispute fraud", tread dangerously close to racial animus; because the latter is rather minor and the former is completely imaginary, it is hard for liberals to understand how they come to be elevated by conservatives into damning indictments of the administration, unless racial animus has something to do with it. So when Mr Hillyer then goes on to condemn Mr Obama's arrogance for failing to apologise over these humdrum or indeed nonexistent offences, and given that Mr Obama has in fact been quite apologetic over more serious mistakes (the flawed debut of Healthcare.gov), I have to feel that what we're seeing here comes from a rather unsettling place.

At the same time, I agree with Mr Douthat: these kinds of debates are close to useless. It's incredibly hard to carry on a private one-on-one conversation with another individual about your perceptions of their subconscious motivations. It's essentially impossible to do this on a national political scale, when the energy of partisanship is directed precisely towards exacerbating the conflict rather than opening up a space for dialogue. I find Mr Hillyer's column infuriating.

 I find today's comments by conservatives unfavourably contrasting Mr Obama with Nelson Mandelaequally infuriating. Mr Obama seems to me to be precisely the sort of moderate, centrist, I-understand-your-perspective type of politician that conservatives claim to be looking for; all of the energy torquing him into a figure of racial polarisation has come from the conservatives who claim to be angered by that polarisation. ("New Black Panthers"? Seriously?) But I don't think there is any way for me to get people who detest Mr Obama to accept that view, so I'm not sure what the point of the discussion is.

 It took me a lot of time and effort to gain a better understanding of how I deal with racial status anxieties—and that was a dialogue with my own subconscious! I'm not too optimistic that a discussion between sharply polarised political camps over the same issues is likely to get anywhere.