It is all about race...but it doesn't have to be.

As recently as a few years ago, I honestly did not realize how much of America's political discourse is shaped by racial issues. I thought of the black-white divide as one issue among many, and one that would shrink in importance as the black-white income gap closed over time.

It was Paul Krugman who first woke me up to the all-encompassing importance of race in American politics. At first I resisted - that's not the America I want to live in, after all - but his logic steadily ground me down. I came to realize that even if I didn't see issues in terms of blacks vs. whites, and even if issues had little or no logical relationship to the racial divide, the important fact was that so very many Americans think that race is important. Eventually, like Jimmy Carter, I was seeing racial overtones around every corner.

Via racist blogger Steve Sailer, here is a blog post that I think sums up the way a lot of Americans unconsciously frame political issues:

Perhaps there is a growing realization that, when it comes to pretty much everything, it's all about race?

Obama himself is all about race - he's nothing without his race - he'd be just another boring guy of above-average intelligence whom no one's ever heard of. Crime is all about race. Education is all about race. Government spending and taxation are all about race. The securitized-mortgage calamity was all about race. Income inequality is all about race. Is health care all about race? It's largely an issue of who pays for it vs. who benefits from it, and so like all such conundrums it too boils down to race...And, obviously, there's immigration.

When I watch middle-class white folks run riot on the National Mall to protest against a health reform plan that would almost certainly benefit them, I tend to wonder if someone spiked their communion wafers with LSD...until I see the racist signs they're carrying, and I realize that their thought process is similar to the one described by that blogger. They're not thinking about public options, cost control, and the fee-for-service problem. They're thinking "I will pay money and black/Hispanic people will reap the benefits." It's as simple as that. And, of course, black and Hispanic Americans are often thinking along similar lines, from the other side of the aisle.

The tragedy, of course, is that even if it is all about race, it shouldn't be. Health care reform, real estate industry regulation, and taxation may impact different races differently, but that's just because of income differences; if every single person in this country was white, the pros and cons of these issue would be the same. Education and crime are a bit murkier - reducing crime and boosting education will certainly be easier if more black people feel as if they have a stake in American institutions - but again, most of the real policy issues don't depend on our racial makeup.

But here I am, like a silly economist, talking about efficiency - talking about what the best policy is for the country - when what's on most politically active people's minds is equity, or using the government to decide who gets what. In, say, Japan or Sweden, your average middle-class Joe Sixpack looks at a poor person and says "Dang, I'm one pink slip away from being that guy...I better vote for national health care!" But in America, a middle-class white Joe looks at a poor black guy, and tends to think "There's no chance of me becoming him. He's poor because he's black. If I vote for national health care, there's no chance I'll get the benefits." Joe isn't thinking about the free market. He's worried about "fairness" and equity and redistribution of wealth, just as much as any socialist.

Of course, Joe is wrong - there are plenty of white guys who do fall out of the middle class. But those obvious visual, linguistic, and cultural differences cause Joe to make a fundamental misattribution - THE Fundamental Misattribution, I'd call it if they let me name things. The Japanese Joe Sixpacks believe that government spending increases equity (by canceling out the inividual luck of the draw), while the American Joes believe it decreases equity (by rewarding/punishing people for the luck of the racial draw). This, I think, is the key point.

And as a result, America is in real danger of turning into Brazil - a balkanized country of (white/Asian) gated communities and neglected violent (black/Native American) slums, where no one trusts the national government to provide public goods, so public goods don't get provided.

How do we correct this? How do we make people stop thinking about race and start thinking about policy?

The magic bullet would be if we could get people to be colorblind, but that isn't going to happen. The only real chance we have is to close the racial income gap. If the distributions of income and wealth are the same for whites, blacks, and Hispanics (and, eventually, Asians), then people won't think of smart economic policies as being racially biased (because the impact on equity across racial groups will be zero). That in itself is a tall, tall order. But it may be the only chance our nation has to remain, well, a nation.

Update: Yes, I realize that a lot of the racial problem comes from our regional division, and the ghost of that "other" American proto-civilization that was crushed 144 years ago. Even closing the racial income gap is not going to make Southern whites stop feeling antipathy toward blacks. But nothing will ever make Southern whites stop feeling antipathy toward blacks; we have to worry about averting racial balkanization in the Midwest and the West.