Everything you need to know is in the first sentence and everything after that is I'm sure a prickly defense of that first sentence.

Next.

Have hope can float

Who is this fossilized

Soc-i-o-scat-cog-ical

Stone age dope?

As another of color

You words don't speak to me

Brother

You're crazier than Mike Tyson

Actually, your reaction to Mr. Dyson's first answer says more about you than his first answer says about the rest of the interview.

Go pinch off a log.

I mean, I'm a white male in my 40's. How am I to relate to a movement that bemoans any success I've earned or that believes the best way to help people up is by pushing down others? Clearly the author has not been following the latest polls. This is a tight election but let's not make it about race and let's not make people feel guilty if they don't vote for Obama. I think for many Americans, between 30 and 60, who are working hard to support families, they see a clear choice in policies between the two candidates and are choosing one over the other for a variety of reasons. To speak so glowingly of one candidate and to say that he has already won is to minimalize my vote and the votes of many, many other Americans. We look at character, accomplishment, experience, policies, fairness, and potential impact on our lives when we decide for whom we will vote. It's not about race. Not to me. But if it were, then let's please at least examine both sides and not just perceived or implied racism for just the one candidate. And for the record, I applaud Bill Cosby for his views and for trying to get African Americans to accept responsibility for their actions and their lives.

And it will benefit everybody - disband the DEA, stop putting money into any kind of drug law enforcement and start funding drug treatment centers and forcing insurance companies to pay for drug rehab. He can end the Drug War, in which we haven't had a single victory since it's inception.

End the Drug War.

Don't need Dyson's

Dicey 'lil saucey-logical

Melodrama

The dude is pedantic

To the pointless point of furry-frantic

Don't talk down to moi like a he in the know

Like you're my numba one

Pundit bro pro

Old obsolescence

Is needful of the EXIT door

As a white teacher at an inner-city high school (who grew up in the suburbs going to a solidly middle-class school 25+ years ago), I have a perspective on race and education. Maybe better, maybe not, but a perspective nontheless.

And while I see the young Black and Latino students at my school struggling with poor economic conditions, poor home situations and poor family histories, one thing I seldom see from young people (of any color) is an acknowledgement that, from high school on at least, they have some control over their own destiny.

Part of this is the nature of teen-agers the world over. And I understand that it is difficult to "break the mold" if you come from a culture of low achievement and expectations. But I know that I and many of my fellow teachers bend over backwards to give kids opportunities. And many of the kids seem not to care.

If anything, we are too nice and too nuturing and do not hold them to high enough standards. It's a Catch-22: If we push them to achieve and hold them accountable, they simply quit because it's too hard. But if we coddle them and hold their hand, they curse us later for not preparing them properly for the next level. It starts long before they get to us so by the time we get them, they aren't willing or able to do more.

Every so often, we can cajole or trick one of our kids into busting through, but it doesn't happen often enough. We're raising a generation of uninspired victims. The "good" news, though, is this pathology is color blind and cuts across racial lines. The white kids are just as uninspired and unmotived, too.

thank you Dyson (Meyer and Salon) for taking the risk to speak truth to power. the power in this case is the spin of group think in political blog culture. a group think peppered with raw emotions brought out by a high stakes election.

the optimist in me believes that your telling your story while talking about Barack will add a dose of reality back into the mix. a dose much needed, because some of us are playing make believe, afraid of dealing with the reality of past and present choices we've made, hoping voting for Barack will make the nastiness just go away.

if Barack, as he rides a high-flying turnout machine to victory, would simply tell your father's story, tell your family's story, and say; this is what black folks look like, this is what American stories look like, successes and failures, it looks just like all of us. if he were to do that, maybe then we'd find our way to a post-racial reality.

p.s. bad mood klytus? where's that playful punch?

Dyson appears to be projecting his own racial "tightrope" onto Obama. What makes Dyson think that Obama is "tormented" or on a "tightrope" at all? David Brooks, Joe Klein, and others seem much closer to the mark in focusing on how amazingly calm and untroubled Obama is, not for a black man but for a national politician. Neither Brooks nor Klein has ever seen such an unflappable national public figure. This is not a "mask"; it's the authentic way Obama is. It's unique, certainly, but no less real for being so. It's natural for Dyson, trapped in his own academic paradigms about race, to need to shoehorn Obama, whose reality shatters all these paradigms, right back into them. But it won't wash. Dyson's cliches about race are now as passe as Jesse Jackson's. It's a whole new racial ball game in America now, however many old-fashioned black politicians and academics are put out of work by it.