Today's conservatives say America's race situation is pretty much resolved or at least sufficiently so that government doesn't need to do anything special any longer for Black people.
Today's progressives say conservatives either have to be kidding, blind or out of their minds.
Today's conservatives respond angrily that progressives are calling them racist by suggesting they don't seem to care about Black people.
Today's progressives explain that they are not calling anyone individually racist because they can't see into individual hearts. They say the problem no longer is individual racism, anyway, but the collective lingering effects of a history of racism. They call that "institutional racism" or "systemic racism" that keeps Black people in self-perpetuating states of disadvantage through no individual fault of their own or of any lone white person.
Today's conservatives curse such thinking as "critical race theory," which is their poll-tested catch-all derision of charges of a systemic problem.
Today's progressives say critical race theory is a law school course, not that there's anything wrong with it, and that recognizing that Black people remain generally disadvantaged is not a theory, but an evident truth, the confrontation of which is essential.
Today's conservatives scoff at the notion that police brutality is a race matter considering that five Black police officers face charges in the beating to death of Tyre Nichols, a Black man in Memphis, and two white officers were charged federally just recently with executing that broad-daylight beating of a white passer-though in Crawford County last August.
Today's progressives say that's their very point--that racism is so embedded in our system and institution of law enforcement that it thrives through Black police chiefs and among Black officers. They acknowledge there might be other systemic and institutional cancers in law enforcement, such as officer rage and senses of entitlement as the do-what-it-takes protectors in our violent society.
Two Arkansas state senators, conservative Dan Sullivan of Jonesboro and progressive Clarke Tucker of Little Rock, had much that very conversation in their own way in a Senate committee last week.
Sullivan has a bill--and I suspect it'll be law in a few days because this is deep conservatism's fertile season in Arkansas--to say that state and local governments shall no longer engage in policies or practices that distinguish races, unless in special circumstance such as a requirement for federal funds.
Sullivan offered the conservative view that to do special policy initiatives for one race over another is to be racist. His bill would effectively say we're not going to do affirmative action anymore in Arkansas unless some federal leverage ties our hands in special cases.
Tucker said it's simply false that Black people have caught up or been sufficiently aided in the effort. He said that ceasing any special commitment would amount to the very worst thing considering race troubles still with us. He said state and local governments have offices pushing programs to give special boosts to Black-owned and women-owned businesses and that Sullivan's bill apparently would padlock those worthy efforts.
Sullivan said Tucker was calling him a racist and that he didn't appreciate it. Tucker said it was not his intent to say that a regressive race policy reflected individual racism in anyone advancing it.
All of that amounts to a conversation the nation is still having and needs to continue having, but at a higher and broader level. The first reform of the conversation would be to understand that whether one is a racist is no longer a factor.
Here's what that means: A white-flight family helping to render integrated inner-city schools re-segregated might or might not be racist but most assuredly would be fearful on the basis of declining home-equity value and crime.
Either way, the effects of lingering institutional or systemic racism feed the circumstances leading to the individual fear.
A zero-sum debate would be so much easier.
It's fair to say that efforts for race-relations improvements have been ill-served for decades by conservative resistance--not only by Republicans, but by 1950s-vintage segregationist Southern Democrats.
But then there was that moment I had years ago with the liberal tennis pal who, after a sweaty couple of sets, mumbled in a context I don't recall that it was starting to dawn on him that all the left's well-intended efforts of the 1960s onward had failed.
I mumbled "yeah."
I wish I'd said not all of them and that the time was getting close to say out loud among more than friends what he'd mumbled to a like-minded pal.
That time is now, pretty much.
We need to fix what hasn't worked without abandoning efforts altogether.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.