The no-indictment-of-Wilson post

You know the result.  Perhaps also about Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadali's rant on MSNBC about "St. Louis's race war" and "systemic racism."  About Brown's mother's post-announcement rant about how "you motherf-----s think this is a joke!"  About the miles-long traffic back-up on Interstate 44 due to its being blocked by "protestors."  About the 25 structural fires in Ferguson.

What reaction does this invoke in you?  The main component of my attitude is embarrassment.

I'm so damn tired of preoccupation with race.  I was tired of it before Eric Holder called us a "nation of cowards."  Before Soledad O'Brien's multi-installment series on race for CNN.  Hell, I was tired of it back in 1987, when Al Sharpton hustled his way to fame in the Tawana Brawley fraud.

There was a time when a distinctly black take on American life was a rich contribution to American culture.  That's what the great musical comedies of Will Marion Cook and Bob Cole and J. Rosemond Johnson and Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle were all about.  That's what the Harlem Renaissance  - Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington et al - was all about.  The great musical forms - jazz, jump blues, doo-wop, classic soul both southern and northern - without which twentieth-century America would have had an entirely different feel.  The distinct take on cuisine.

When did all that begin to deteriorate?  About the same time as American culture overall began to deteriorate.  In the case of Americans who happened to be black (the "black community," as it's generally called), Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm - and caught no small amount of flack for it - in 1965, with his report on the perilous state of the black family.

And that has continued apace. We all know the statistics about out-of-wedlock births, unemployment, incarceration rates.

Along with drugs and welfare, a major culprit is the race-hustler industry, led by the aforementioned Sharpton. It has its barricade-manners, as well as its intellectuals (Cornell West, Stanley Crouch).  There's quite a pantheon of very rich music moguls who have provided the soundtrack for it.

This cabal of poison-dispensers has tried to perpetuate a notion of a "black community" way out of proportion to the realities of twenty-first-century American society.  While countless Americans who happen to be black are living proof that anybody of any color can become successful, prosperous contributors to this world, there is an increasingly desperate attempt on the part of the hustlers to keep pigmentation front and center.  I discussed this in a recent post on race, citing the new ABC-TV sitcom about an advertising executive, husband and father who is worried that his kids aren't growing up "black enough," along with some other examples.

The raw truth is that an undeniable, distinguished, distinctly black strain of the overall American heritage has been blown way out of proportion so that a few loudmouths can make lots of money and wield lots of influence.  And so a lot of barely civilized people can do dope and screw on the government dime.

The only answer is to just plain not play in that.  Whatever your color.  Build a life of achievement, family and real personal growth, whoever you are.  If you're black, that will come through.  After all, you cook dinner in the evening, and you have a music library. If your background is Irish, that will come through.  Ditto Italian.  Ditto Mexican.

But knock it off with this crud about how your demographic identity makes it impossible to just get up in the morning and live an American life, like most of your fellow citizens are doing.

It's a crock, and, hopefully, it's ringing increasingly hollow.