1. First, the question bugged me. What do we say about ourselves when we check off a box like that? If you know nothing about me except that I’m white, or that I’m black, how does that help you understand me? In fact, doesn’t it have the opposite effect — painting me with vague, sweeping generalities that may or may not be true?

2. I did it out of old-fashioned liberalism, a hard habit to break. My understanding is that the census exists primarily to count citizens so that congressional districts may be accurately apportioned. What our color has to do with congressional district apportionment is, again, a mystery. But minorities get undercounted in the census, and are thus underserved in government outlays. So I thought I’d counterbalance an uncounted black family with our family. Sure, this means fewer benefits for my race, but I figured, hey, white people had a good year.

3. I always wanted to be black, like in the Lou Reed song. And this seemed like a much easier and more socially acceptable way to go about it than wearing makeup like John Howard Griffin in “Black Like Me.” And less embarrassing than Al Jolson in “The Jazz Singer.”

4. I thought it would do my family good. I told my family at supper we would be black from now on. Not that it would change anything in the way we go about our business. But somewhere, on a government mag-tape database somewhere, spinning around at a bazillion miles per second, we’re black. My family didn’t care.

5. I wanted to show solidarity with my extended family, which is diverse, including great people of numerous stripes and hues, including African-American. To my in-laws Kathy, Seantelle, Neecie, John and Marcus — this is for you. And to my Uncle Jack, who used to do audiovisual work for Jesse Jackson, and now has a huge adoptive family of folks of color — I haven’t met you all, but I can tell you’re terrific.

6. Patriotism. If I have heard anything repeated over and over all my life until it makes me sick, it is that you can be anything you want to be in America. You can be president or an astronaut or a cowboy. Well, at the moment I want to be black. So by what right can my country bar me from this ambition? I know this sounds silly, but I mean it. Isn’t this the place that isn’t supposed to put a ceiling on your ambitions?

7. Because, scientifically speaking, I am African-American, and so are you. According to the Eve Theory, which is more than just a theory, the entire human race appears to have originated in the DNA of a single woman who lived on the Olduvai Plain 1.5 million years ago. Every living person has DNA that can be traced to her. If that doesn’t make us African, what could?

Animal rights groups couldn’t be expected to know what dog racing is all about, competitors said, and yet here they were, trying to wreck everything. They’d persuaded people on the East Coast to spam a sponsor, and that had resulted in the company’s yanking its support the day before the race. Mushers blamed the Humane Society of the United States and its even wickeder cousin, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “They don’t think we should run dogs at all,” fumed one competitor. “They say we beat the teams to make them run themselves to death.”

It’s common knowledge among Alaskans that champion Rick Swenson had once lost a dog mushing through an icy stream and hadn’t been appropriately apologetic, and that Jerry Riley reputedly hit a dog with a snow hook 10 years ago. As the media got increasingly into the act, race watchers were saying, the Iditarod was going to have to withstand more public scrutiny, and the big test was sure to come up. But here in plain view at Wasilla was the material from which all the stories were made — the mushers, the dogs, the start of the trail — and everything looked great. The teams were doing their damnedest to drag their handlers off their feet, to lose the mob and run. No cues were needed at the end of the starter’s countdown, when the handlers scattered and the musher stood off the brake. They all took off like furry mercury, heads down, all business.

Swingley was grinning his head off as he left the starting line. So was three-time champ and dog-care wizard Martin Buser. DeeDee Jonrowe, sponsored by clothing retailer Eddie Bauer, mushed out to noisy cheers. Everybody was a fan. Lynda Plettner, revered for her dog sense and exuberant straight talk, high-fived everybody as she rocketed out the chute. One man sped off with a carnation in his teeth. People with the biggest sponsors had color-coordinated harnesses, parkas and even booties. Jerry Riley, who claims he started mushing “at conception,” showed up in a stretched-out sweater. Australian Neen Brown wowed the crowd with the only team of matched Siberians. The Russian entrant, Anna Bonderenko, sported huskies the color of milky tea. Some dogs wore capes to reflect the sun, all wore protective booties and all were towing a three-day supply of their own food, in case they got stormbound or lost.

Native Alaskan Mike Williams, who mushes to promote sobriety — a big issue in the bush — was kissed by his wife in her magnificent beaded parka as he departed, his sled crammed with little local kids. Three-time-winner Jeff King got his usual huge send-off. The day before, at the ceremonial start in Anchorage, he had mushed down Fourth Avenue with a noticeably pale young girl standing with him on his runners — this year’s Make-A-Wish Foundation child. King does this every year; some of his passengers have since died. One was buried in an Iditarod shirt.

All in all it’s a compelling scene: The dogs are nearly inside out with excitement, the weather’s beautiful, the place is crawling with vets, race officials stand ready to disqualify mushers for meanness and, after all the effort, the prize money is chump change compared with what athletes in some other sports normally make.

In the days to come, we all know, there’ll be variations in mushers’ talents and suitabilities to the task, and there’ll be canine infirmities that get accidentally overlooked. Tired, sore dogs will be “dropped” at checkpoints, to be fed and flown home. One might even die. Does this make the race a tragedy? The pro-mushing editorials in the Anchorage Daily News keep rolling out, the calls pour into the radio stations and the animal rights folks’ Web pages continue to blast the race.

Fans can’t keep up with the goings-on beyond the first major checkpoint: The roads all run out. They can only grab information by checking with the official Iditarod Web page, which quickly becomes habit forming, since the standings change constantly: who’s dropping dogs, who skimped on their rest periods, who got wrapped around a tree. Beyond the obviously fatiguing nature of such a marathon, it all seems like a lot of strange fun.

But the Humane Society doesn’t think so. The dogs, it says, are “raised completely outdoors in harsh northern climates in large ‘dog yards,’ where they are confined by tethers that allow them access to doghouses but which purposely prevent them from interaction with other dogs.” PETA announces on its kids page that “dogs in the Iditarod have to run an average of 120-130 miles a day nearly every day for 10-14 days in a row! At least one or two dogs die every year, sometimes over a dozen die, usually from stress pneumonia, ulcers or ‘Sudden Death Syndrome’ — which means that they just drop dead while running!”

Nobody’s suggesting that mushers can prevent accidents when they’re running so hard, but these allegations seem ridiculous. How can a dog in a dog yard be prevented from interaction with other dogs? Another thing: 120 miles a day for 10 days is longer than the entire race. The suggestion is that the mushers and their sponsors are a bunch of lying bastards who live to torture dogs and make money.

But only the Sled Dog Action Coalition Web site goes all the way. The lead item on this site is a photo of a team mushing along, with the musher in the basket with his eyes closed. One of the dogs is being dragged — and looks dead. The picture certainly appears to be unfaked. “The bond between dogs and the musher is one of abuse and exploitation,” the SDAC claims. “If a musher loved his dogs he would not force them to run 1,150 miles in 9 to 14 days.”

All the site’s info is presented as if it were evidence of crime: sleds hitting trees, mushers worried about the weather, tug lines on harnesses being short, the race’s purse money going up, dogs chasing bison. It fogs up the message of the picture, which leads a reader to wonder: Is the photo recent, and is it typical? If so, it’s all the coalition needs to dismantle the whole racing system. But that’s not happening, even though the picture implies that the nature of the Iditarod is to deny that anything brutal ever happens, for the express purpose of committing brutality. “Imagine being tethered to 15 other runners on a 50-foot gangline while pulling 400 pounds,” the SDAC quotes USA Today sports columnist Joe Saraceno as saying.

Well, no, let’s not. Being able to read dogs’ body language is something most Americans, even those who don’t know beans about training them, can do. And if you’ve ever seen a team at the starting gate, much less ridden behind one, the animals tell you one thing with their voices and movements: They love the race. They jerk you into a run before you can breathe, and it feels fantastic. Eventually, they’ll settle into a doggy trot, which they can keep up for a couple of hours provided they don’t get too thirsty or too hot. Under the right conditions, they can keep it up all day.

The fact that Iditarod mushers try to create the right conditions and to outwit the weather on a race this long tells you something about their egos, not to mention the basic Alaskan idea of how to do things. Facing down deathly discomfort is a sacred ritual here, and they’ll be damned if a bunch of creampuffs from “outside,” where they know nothing, is going to tell them how and whether to mush. The Iditarod is an exaggerated version of something Alaskans do every day that a lot of animal fans would be nuts about, if only they got the chance to try it.

The criticism the race received this year can serve as a useful heads-up on dog care. But this will work only if the accusations are honest and accurate. The current situation practically guarantees that both sides won’t be chatting with each other anytime soon, and that the curious public can get set for less, not more, news on how our canine pals up north are doing.

Meanwhile, nobody died this year, at least as far as we know. And you know, it wouldn’t kill Fido if you booted him off the living room couch and gave him something to do once in a while, too.

Our community is in pain over this tragedy. If anything it has brought the races together to mourn and to seek answers together. The type of irresponsible race-baiting that Mr. Horowitz suggests in his article and in his so-called seminal question of the sordid tale of the death of this little girl is completely beyond the bounds of decency.

By the way, this was his question: “Why did it take the press days to reveal that the shooter was black and his victim white?” I say who in the hell cares? Mr. Horowitz proves to me that pundits and so-called experts like him are far removed from the reality of life in America. He is like an orchestra with two instruments: a computer and a lot of racial animosity.

Arthur A. Busch
Genesee County prosecutor
200 Courthouse
Flint, MI 48502

Here is my reply:

Dear Mr. County Prosecutor,

I’m flattered but also concerned that you would take time out from your busy schedule protecting the citizens of Genesee County to wag your finger at me over alleged racial offenses in my Salon piece. If you had read what I wrote more carefully, you would see that the part about Kayla Rolland is not about race but the “moral idiocy of liberalism.” Therefore, I am also indebted to you for providing a perfect example of this problem.

In fact, I never once suggested that the killing of Kayla Rolland was racially motivated. I will come back to the question I raised about the media and race in a moment, but I hope you don’t conduct all your prosecutions as irresponsibly as you have this persecution of me.

Here are two remarkable sentences from your letter: “Never once during this investigation did the issue of race ever get raised. Nor for that matter is it any factor whatsoever in this case.” Tell me something. How do you know that race is not a factor in a case if you never raise the issue during your investigation?

I have another question: Why haven’t you and your office filed charges against the mother, father and uncle of the little perpetrator of this tragic killing? Aren’t there any laws in Michigan about child abuse? What about the social workers who knew this child was living with criminals in a crack house? Are they under investigation? Since the killer had already stabbed another first-grader, why is your office not investigating the school authorities and other public agencies who were obviously derelict in protecting Kayla, not to mention her killer?

May I offer a hypothesis? Could it be that the liberalism that guides our municipal agencies has lost a certain moral sense of what is right and wrong, so that it has come to protect little offenders like this, bending the old rules to keep what we used to call “delinquents” mainstreamed with their potential victims?

“60 Minutes” recently featured a case in which a district attorney in Alabama is attempting to have a disturbed and malicious youngster (white) removed from the public school system as a threat to other students. The D.A. is being strenuously opposed by liberal advocates of the “disabled,” because the mental dysfunction that makes him a threat to others is, under current civil rights law, legally a “disability” that protects him from “persecution” by oppressors like the district attorney.

Perhaps something like that happened all along the way in the case you have so superficially investigated to protect the killer and to expose Kayla to attack. But of course that is no concern of yours. You are too busy protecting the whole mess (including your dereliction of duty) from politically incorrect busybodies like me.

One reason I asked the question as to why the press was so colorblind in this case was that I couldn’t imagine a parallel situation where if a little black girl in a class with an overwhelming majority of whites had been shot by a white youngster that the press would have no interest in those facts. Particularly since the killer had committed a violent act against another student previously. (By the way, did you or any of your investigators bother to inquire about the race of the previous victim? Certainly the press has shown no interest in this at all.)

My second reason for introducing the issue of race is the way in which the dysfunctionality of the perpetrator’s family was allowed to disappear from all radar screens as the tragedy was transformed by the president and others into a poster-case for the new trigger-lock gun law. You will remember that I asked how a family of outlaws, with stolen guns in their crack-house abode, was going to be impressed by a new law about triggers? It seemed like a reasonable question to me. Just as it seems reasonable to me to wonder whether law enforcement’s willingness to allow a bunch of criminals to have their way with two small children (the shooter and his 8-year-old brother) had anything at all to do with the fact that they were black? The same question could be put to the social workers. Social workers, as is well known, are often guided by a left-wing worldview that causes them to treat dysfunctional people, who happen to be “of color,” as victims of oppression who need to be protected rather than dysfunctional people who may be threats to themselves and everyone around them.

Even though I did not once suggest that the killing of Kayla was racially motivated, do you really think that had the colors been reversed you and your investigators would have had no interest in the question itself? Particularly if Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton had arrived on the scene to put the question to you? Perhaps that is because the existence of white racism is a clichi, while the existence of black racism is more like a taboo.

It seems to me that this ought to be a time for reflection on your part about what you might have done to prevent this tragedy, rather than lecturing the rest of us about denial, morality and responsible discourse.

Discrimination is unethical, no matter who’s practicing it. But why shouldn’t black colleges fill their leadership posts with African-American professors if their mission is to provide role models for a black student body?

The only thing that chaps Americans more than discrimination is reverse discrimination. The former may be a repugnant violation of fairness, but the latter is a stinging reminder that paybacks are hell. In a status-quo world where white professors are consistently dealt the upper hand, is it valid for them to rage that they’ve been cheated? When university administrators have to promote certain faculty members to right historic wrongs, is it justifiable to overlook someone else who is qualified? Can a seesaw maintain equilibrium?

When a worthy obligation to provide black role models is perceived as discrimination, you have what is known in technical circles as a cluster fuck. No matter who you are or what your position is, you’re going to get it in the ass. Which is why you won’t see Jesse Jackson running to this school for expelling white professors like he ran to an Illinois high school earlier this year after it expelled several black students for fighting. There is no natural constituency here. Blacks are uncomfortable with defending a double standard and some whites wonder why Livingstone shouldn’t have the right to promote blacks in leadership roles. No one is going to win this fight. It’s just too damned complicated.

In the past five months, the plaintiffs have filed three suits in state court charging breach of contract, negligence and discrimination. They are seeking more than $1 million in damages. Of the five plaintiffs, three are current professors and two are former teachers. According to the professors, administrators refuse to even discuss a settlement. But in early February, the board of trustees fired Livingstone’s president, Burnett Joiner; everyone is keeping mum on whether his termination was due to the lawsuits.

Arthur Steinberg, one of the plaintiffs, has taught history and law at Livingstone since 1992. He said he and his fellow plaintiffs have a “smoking gun”: The case hinges on a 1994 review of the college’s academic programs, in which an administrator recommended replacing four white professors, and it named black professors.

Steinberg’s civil complaint alleges that in conversations with colleagues, a college official referred to him as “that Jewish lawyer” and “that Jew Steinberg.” He also claims that he’s been a victim of physical intimidation — nails in his car tires, broken taillights and a threat from the husband of one administrator to break a chair over his head. Steinberg says the college failed to promote him from assistant to associate professor despite his qualifications and promoted lesser-qualified blacks instead.

Fellow plaintiff Bob Russ teaches English composition and literature and has been a faculty member for 10 years. He claims he has documents proving the college violated its written rules for considering tenure, using one set of procedures for blacks and another for him. Russ also alleges the college accused him of trying to eliminate black authors from his Harlem Renaissance class.

Huh? How do you eliminate black authors from a Harlem Renaissance class? “Exactly my point,” said Russ. “It was the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

Actually, hiring a white guy to teach a Harlem Renaissance class at a black school is the stupidest thing anyone’s ever heard. Accusing him of eliminating black authors is merely incompetence. If administrators are going to accuse Russ of bigotry, they could have come up with a more plausible example. Perhaps the school should hire pros like the Los Angeles Police Department to teach them how to camouflage abuse.

Amateurish is an apt description of how Livingstone has handled the situation from the beginning. It’s had a total news whiteout (or blackout, depending on your point of view). Livingstone is a private, church-supported, historically black college. Founded in 1879 by ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, it’s in Salisbury, N.C., about an hour north of Charlotte. Of the school’s 75 faculty members, 23 are white, and it has a handful of white students. “They’re all here on athletic scholarship,” says student Eddie Lopez, completely oblivious to the irony.

The school’s silence on the discrimination suit is a mystery. A trial date has not been set, and the professors say that administrators refuse to discuss a settlement. It has granted no interviews, no statements, no return calls. The Salisbury Post, a smart small-town newspaper known for its diplomacy and even-handedness wrote an editorial calling the suit “ironic” but “plausible” given the number of teachers and the alleged evidence. The editorial hoped that Livingstone would be a paradigm of equity given its reputation as “the champion of those who have felt the sting of discrimination in years past.” Puzzled by the school’s silence, the editorial went on to say “the community waits to hear some response from this important institution.” In the South, this is what’s known as being shrill.

In addition to being bypassed for promotion, Steinberg and Russ claim administrators allowed a climate of racial animus to thrive. In one example, they claim a black professor fomented racial distrust by insulting courses taught by all white professors. “Students would come up to us and complain about it,” said Russ. “They even nicknamed the rants, ‘Why We Should Hate Whitey Lectures.’”

In a May article in Change, Josie Cantu-Weber analyzed university-related racial discrimination suits filed in 1997. Oddly, reverse-discrimination suits outnumbered standard discrimination suits 9-8. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the majority of reverse discrimination cases filed in 1999 challenged affirmative action. Not the Livingstone case. “We’re not saying we suffered an unintended consequence of affirmative action,” said Russ. “We’re saying we were explicitly targeted for discrimination. Reverse discrimination as an unintended consequence of affirmative action is unfortunate. Discrimination as we’ve experienced it is odious.”

The Livingstone case bears a remarkable resemblance to a suit filed against another predominantly black college, Cheyney University in Pennsylvania. In the fall, a federal judge upheld a jury’s award of $2 million to white professors who claimed they were subject to a campaign of harassment after they objected to racist hiring policies. In their suit, the professors alleged that a department chairman said he would not consider hiring whites for departmental vacancies. They also claimed the college incited students to protest against Cheyney classes taught by white professors, and one administrator referred to the teachers as “rats” and “traitors.” Hey, what happened to “Whitey?” Apparently it’s a Southern pejorative.

Some academics believe it isn’t possible for a powerless minority to discriminate against a powerful majority. “The whole notion of ‘reverse’ discrimination is an oxymoron,” said John H. Stanfield II, the chairman of the sociology department at Morehouse College, a predominantly black, male college in Atlanta. “It’s impossible for black people to be in an exploitative position over whites. Yes, the Livingstone administration has power but it’s circumscribed by the real power structure in North Carolina, which is white. One call from Jesse Helms and Livingstone would be brought to its knees.”

If Livingstone bases its defense on Stanfield’s “oxymoron” statement, it might as well cut a check to the five white professors now and be done with it. In the Cheyney case, U.S. District Court Judge Robert F. Kelly found that the jury had plenty of evidence of blacks discriminating against whites. The idea that reverse discrimination is an oxymoron deeply offends Steinberg. “I teach constitutional law,” he said. “If you justify discrimination for one group, you have to justify it for every group. To say that there’s a good reason to blatantly discriminate against people because of their skin color goes against everything we believe in America.”

Contradicting his earlier statement, Stanfield said he agreed with Steinberg. “Being a black institution doesn’t give them cause to discriminate,” he said. “But white America is in denial about the true nature of landing a job or a promotion. It pays homage to the myth of meritocracy, but the real way you get ahead in America is not through competency but through ‘sponsored mobility,’ having somebody looking out for you.”

Sponsored mobility is a fancy sociological term for being well-connected. As the tenet goes, what counts is who you know, not what you know. Stanfield maintains that sponsored mobility is a fact in America; studies prove that the only way to get ahead is to make sure there is someone above you pulling as hard as you’re pushing. Stanfield doesn’t see the practice as inherently racist, but he points out that most sponsors are white. If blacks don’t know many whites (or haven’t developed strong relationships with them), they don’t get sponsored. And vice-versa. Stanfield has an interesting perspective on the Livingstone lawsuit: Maybe it’s not discrimination. Maybe the white professors just didn’t have black mentors willing to mobilize them, much like many black professors don’t have white sponsors in universities.

Though it’s hard to argue against the merits of black schools trying to provide black role models, it’s also impossible to defend Livingstone’s alleged discrimination. The “I-can-do-it-but-you-can’t” double standard is enough to choke the sympathy right out of the most liberal of throats. Still, there is something disingenuous about white professors who are shocked, SHOCKED, that a black institution founded with a mission to provide black role models would want its department chairs filled by black professors.

On the ground, it looks like the five white professors got screwed. If they can prove their allegations in court, they deserve to win. No one is above the law, even people who were once crushed by it. But from an aerial view, it looks like five white professors blasted the honorable intent of a black administration and used unassailable logic as ammunition.

It was a remarkable change of pace for a national political culture that just last week was consumed by the spectacle of the Republican candidates pandering to white people who like to fly the Confederate flag in South Carolina. This, by contrast, was a 90-minute debate driven by the concerns of minorities and poor people. All of the questions (save those by journalists) were asked by people of color, and they were different from the usual political questions — for example, the questions about crime focused on the plight of the people being arrested.

Bradley stated that he would issue an executive order to eliminate racial profiling. “White Americans can no longer deny the plight of black Americans,” he concluded, to uproarious applause. The shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York, he said, “reflects racial profiling in the sense that seeps into the mind of someone, so that he sees a wallet in the hands of a white man as a wallet but a wallet in the hands of a black man as a gun.”

Gore did him one better, saying he’d pass a law outlawing racial profiling, whose effects extend into banking, insurance, schooling and people’s hearts. He concluded with a lyrical coup de grbce, declaring with the intonation of a Southern preacher that he was going to put “as much energy in ed-u-ca-tion as we do into in-car-cer-a-tion.” (Gore may have become a bit too fond of this rhyming scheme. Later, responding to a question about whether African-Americans are owed reparations for slavery, he roared: “I believe the best rep-ar-a-tion is a good ed-u-ca-tion — and affirmative action.”)

Bradley charged back, complaining that President Clinton should have outlawed racial profiling and arguing that Gore led an effort to end affirmative action at the federal level. It’s on Page 208 of George Stephanopolous’ book, he noted, and on cue, Bradley’s aides dutifully handed out press releases to reporters to back this up. And, Bradley asserted, Gore voted to maintain the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory schools like South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, which, as every political junkie in the country now knows, bans interracial dating.

“That is a phony and scurrilous charge,” yelped Gore, who went on to accuse Bradley of voting against affirmative action for minority-owned broadcasting companies in the Senate — prompting loud hoots from the audience.

This debate was a last stand of sorts for Bradley, as even some of his supporters acknowledged Monday night. He is in serious danger of being blown away in the March 7 primaries. Here in his almost back yard of New York, two recent polls place him at least 15 percentage points behind Gore among Democratic voters around the state.

“He’s got to win New York to stay in it,” says Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who worked for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996. But Sheinkopf sees Bradley’s prospects as weak, since most New York politicians are supporting Gore. “Who turns out on March 7? Organization Democrats. It’s not a normal election day. If Bradley gets trounced badly in New York, then there isn’t much left of Bradley. He’s pinning his hopes on getting a black vote, but I don’t see how he gets that.”

Indeed, the incumbent vice president has gotten most of the endorsements of African-American elected officials, particularly in New York City, a point he gleefully pointed out Monday night.

“Do you think that they all have such poor judgment, Sen. Bradley?” he asked.

Ooh! Low blow! Low blow!

“What I think is they don’t know your record as a conservative Democrat,” Bradley responded. More shrieks and boos. “They don’t know that you voted five times over three years for tax exemptions for schools that discriminate on the basis of race.”

Uh-oh. Bad move.

Traces of a grin — no, make that a sneer — spread across Gore’s face. A ripe opportunity had just presented itself. “Y’know what, in my experience, Black Caucus is pretty savvy,” he said. “They know a lot more than you think they know.” An explosion of yelling and applause rose from the crowd.

He wasn’t done yet.

“The Congressional Black Caucus is not out there being led around. They know what the score is, and they know their brothers and sisters in New Jersey said you were never for them walking the walk.”

Ouch.

So, despite the urgency of the occasion for Bradley, it didn’t seem as if he’d won. Near the end of the evening, he grasped for a reliable portion of his playbook: He talked of his days as a rookie for the New York Knicks, and of getting offers to do endorsements that should have gone to his black teammates.

Being a strong president who wants to deal with race means “sometimes telling white Americans what they don’t want to hear,” said Bradley, who cited what he calls “white-skin privilege” — a term that attracted much attention when Bradley used it early in his campaign. Rarely has a mainstream candidate spoken so candidly about race. Bradley, it seems, was actually going to build his campaign around race and the continuing mistreatment of people of color by white people.

But that theme, like the rest of Bradley’s campaign, just never caught fire, not even after his 90 minutes at the Apollo Theater.