The following comments, from chronicle.com, are about the article "What Does Race Have to Do With It?" by John Hartigan Jr. (The Chronicle Review, August 15, online edition)

What has race got to do with it? As long as we make it a flash-point issue, it will be everything. I live in a city that has a very large black population, and often feel the other side of the story. If those who have suffered from racist treatment in the past cannot get past that, and stop treating the progeny of their oppressors in the same manner, prejudice and mistrust will continue—all-black schools and organizations are OK, but not white. There is a college in my area that has an all-Native American dormitory floor. But that is not allowed for Asians, Hispanics, whites, etc.

All-black schools should be considered racist. If racist behavior is wrong against one race, it should be wrong to practice it by any race against any race. Until the "get even" attitudes are gone, there will always be the catalyst for racial violence and prejudiced behavior by all. Equality can never exist if our government, our schools, our people keep making exceptions and either giving more or less to one group or another.

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Please consider the impossibility of having a "conversation" about race, or anything else that matters, when the loudest voices, those of certain media channels and politicians, are interested only in manipulating the discussion for their own profit rather than having any kind of honest dialogue about issues.

Looking at the breakdown in national discussion about race in isolation from an understanding of the breakdown of civil discourse more generally reminds me of those who attempted to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs as entirely a dinosaur-specific problem (for example, looking at genetic and other issues of dinosaur anatomy) without noticing that a mass extinction across all phyla happened at the same time.

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"Where do we go from here: chaos or community?" As a native African-American, I have never been so disappointed in this country. I have been threatened, physically beaten, emotionally harmed, and professionally degraded in regards to respect as well as pay. I understand why others of my race chose to fight back with guns, move to other countries, or pass for another race. If there is an answer, let me hear it.

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There will never be a national dialogue or accommodation of the American Negro. It is impossible to do so when the discussion centers around one side being wrong and the other side being deserving. Apples and oranges. Aside from the cultural differences that cannot be reconciled, it is impossible to do so when one side lives in a self-defeating culture mired in poverty and violence, one enslaved to the "poverty pimps" who get rich living off the backs of the black poor.

Most black institutions are failures culturally and financially. One can review the black-run cities and find poorly managed finances and lousy schools. Their ideas center around getting money out of whitey by annexation of counties, raising taxes on the rich, or forcing school integration through busing. All of them failures. Then the poverty pimps have more ammunition to keep racism alive and well.

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All of this suggests that African-Americans (as a group) cannot compete in a colorblind and egalitarian society. It matters little which standardized measurement is chosen (i.e., ACT, SAT, LSAT, GRE, MCAT, etc.) or how one cares to slice and dice the numbers by socioeconomic status. The gap between African-Americans (as a group) and white Americans (as a group) has consistently remained slightly less than one standard deviation of difference between the two cohorts.

In statistical parlance, this is a significant difference if you are trying to understand how well groups of people are able to retain and process new information.

Therefore, it seems to me that affirmative-action laws will need continuance in this country in perpetuity in order for African-Americans (as a group) to have access to the same levels of power and prosperity normally reserved for everyone else who is able to rise in a traditional merit-based system. Sadly, and unlike other minorities in this country, there is little evidence that African-Americans (as a group) will ever manage to compete on their own.

Naturally, the major drawback is that this type of policy perpetuates the popular liberal and conservative notion that "individual" African-Americans are also unable to compete in any merit-based organization. That is both an insult and a grave disservice to those individuals who fall into this category.

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It's easy to overlook the big story in these recent controversies, namely that everyone involved—the Obama administration, the Tea Party movement, the NAACP, Shirley Sherrod, and don't forget Senator Jim Webb—now proceeds from the same basic premise: No one (white or black, Latino or Asian, etc.) should be discriminated against because of skin color, and justice should be colorblind. That's good news—great news, in fact, and all Americans can take pride in it.

And the fact that there is this basic consensus—not only among those in the news but, more importantly, among the overwhelming majority of all Americans—means race relations are better than ever, are in fact very good, and will continue to improve even more. That's happy news, too, for everyone outside the racial-grievance industry, and an important blessing always worth counting.

Indeed, I never can understand exactly what the national conversation is supposed to be about: Nearly everyone agrees that racial discrimination, though it still exists (in ever-declining amounts), is wrong, and that individuals should be judged as individuals. (I guess we could also discuss the role of culture in the nagging persistence of racial disparities—and the bias it unfortunately encourages—and in particular the disastrous effects of 7 out of 10 African-Americans now being born out of wedlock. But somehow I don't think this is what those calling for the national conversation on race have in mind.)

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I appreciate the guarded optimism of Professor Hartigan, but if the comments on his article are any indication, that optimism is sadly misplaced. What we really want are converts, not conversations. This is as true for race scholars as it is for Fox News fans. We've never had a "national conversation" on race, let alone on much of anything else, and not without reason.

It's naïve to think that academics are capable of changing anything, especially with regard to race. We're awash with studies on race, ethnicity, inequality, and if you take this mountain of research seriously, things are as bad as they've ever been, if not worse. Reports that the sky is falling fill issue after issue of social-science journals, and for all of this "collective wisdom," very little has been done in concrete terms—but it's been a boon for tenure, promotion, and academic careers. It just makes us feel so good when we righteously proclaim the need to redeem others.

In short, the typical academic in the social sciences is more akin to a theologian than a scientist. As such, academics don't wish for solutions to racism, inequality, sexism, among the myriad of other "isms" in the world. They need such research platforms to keep their jobs and train the next generation of theologians.