Legal Commentary

This is a sensitive one, but I think well worth writing about.

In her column this past Sunday, Maureen Dowd (of whom I am generally no great fan) writes about the scene in Washington -- and elsewhere across the country -- after the election:

I grew up in the nation?s capital, but I?ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.

Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel. . . .

I saw a white-haired white woman down the block from me running out to strike up a conversation with a black U.P.S. delivery guy, asking him how he felt and what this meant to him.

I was starting to feel guilty. Every time I passed a black patron at a downtown restaurant or a movie or the Kennedy Center, would perfect strangers want me to ask how they were feeling? Or was that condescending and were they sick to death of it? . . .

Dowd continues by noting that the election of Barack Obama provides an obvious moment of common ground and mutual reflection on the changes in our country, and that it's natural that such conversations take place, even if they are "awkward."  She concludes, a little jokingly: "But is it time now for whites to stop polling blacks on their feelings?"  Leon Wieseltier says some similar things in his typically overheated TNR column this week, ending in the somewhat embarassing way that only Wieseltier can:

I woke up the next morning still under the spell of solidarity and love. I decided to make the spell last. I gave away my tickets to a performance of some late Shostakovich quartets, because for once I was not interested in the despair. Instead I spent the day listening to the Ebonys and the Chi-Lites and the Isley Brothers. For lunch I went to Georgia Brown's for fried green tomatoes. A day of dopey symbols, I admit.

I witnessed something of the same thing here in Alabama, where I was told that a friend -- a fine and decent person who has extended herself in recent months on issues of educational reform in a region that badly needs such efforts -- had come up alongside a black driver who had cut her off, not to cuss him but to roll down her window and give this total stranger a big Obamic thumbs-up.

The controversial part would come, I think, if I tried to make sense of such a phenomenon.  I would inevitably reach the point where I point out that there's a certain de-haut-en-bas quality in such moments, however enthusiastic and loving and well-meaning they are ("you people must be so happy" -- reminiscent, really, of Biden's "he's so articulate" quote); that it is perhaps not just about sharing one's feelings, but also about finding a way to publicly demonstrate one's liberal credentials and assuage one's own racial insecurity; that white people who actually have a healthy number of black friends probably feel less of a need to accost black strangers; and that treating black strangers as fungible recipients of your joy is probably an ineffective substitute for actually having meaningful interactions with people who don't share your racial and/or social, educational, and class background.

It would read, in short, as a critique (but a loving one: I certainly don't think one need be entirely cynical about these moments, and as Dowd writes, awkward conversation is better than none at all) of (mostly white) bien-pensant liberals.  And since that describes much of the Prawfsblawg readership (and writership! -- me included, no doubt), not to mention that of many similar blogs (and the legal academy in general?), well, it might come off a little harsh.  So let me not go there.  I'll just say that, as I wrote last week, everyone can recognize Obama's election as a moving and important step forward.  As usual, though, that step forward can be a decidedly awkward one on the individual level of race relations in America.