A QUESTION FOR DR. DEAN

I have very rarely experienced racism directed at me or someone with me. It's happened a time or two--once in Japan, when I was riding a train through Tokyo and an old codger gave me the evil eye. I can't say it bothered me, because a day or two earlier on that same train another old codger saw me and immediately struck up a conversation about baseball. Hideo Nomo was in his glorious rookie season, and he was the talk of Japan. The first old guy was more representative of the Japan that I lived in for four years--friendly, open to Americans and eager to treat gaijin with respect. The second old guy was just a harmless crank, probably one of those Imperial officers who threatened to commit seppuku after the war, but whose courage failed them and they ended up making boatloads of money working for Honda or Sony and resented Americans for every last yen. I figured he had his own issues to work out, and I was merely a convenient target for a few minutes.

The other time that sticks out was in early 1995. My fiancee and I were walking down a street in San Antonio along with a couple of our friends. We made quite the quartet--two obviously white-bred guys with two attractive Oriental women. As we were walking down the street, minding our own business, talking about this and that, a car with three or four African Americans drove by, and as it passed us, a rather overweight female stuck her large head out of the window and shouted at us:

"Go back to China!"

Which amused us, because none of us had ever been to China. The ladies were from Japan. The ignorance of some knows no bounds--not all Orientals are Chinese, though I suppose a majority are if you look at it in terms of hard numbers. Maybe our verbal assailant was just playing the odds? In any case, you can't go back to a place you've never been.

But how should we square that little incident--being ordered by an ignoramus who happened to be black to leave the country simply because of appearance--with recent utterances by the increasingly offensive Dr. Howard Dean? To the Boston Globe, he said:

"Dealing with race is about educating white folks," Dean said in an interview Tuesday on a campaign swing through the first primary state where African-American voters will have a major impact.

How would "educating white folks"--collateral targets in my San Antonio scenario--have made one bit of difference? It wasn't white folks who shouted at two Japanese women--who for all our shouter knew were American citizens by birth--and told them to leave the country. It wasn't white folks who started an anti-Semitic riot in New York a few years ago, a riot that ended up killing 8 people (that riot was started by a Democrat presidential candidate named Al).

Racism isn't any single race's property, and no single race is alone in guilt. And actually, one of the least reported patterns of racism, but one of the most prominent forms of it in urban areas, is black vs Asian racism, mostly directed at Korean merchants who set up businesses in black neighborhoods. How does "educating white folks" deal with that kind of racism?

Dean's "educating white folks" schtick is the ultimate pander, and probably the worst example of elitist condescension I've heard in years. And talking about race in such a one-sided way is a sign of intellectual cowardice, a cowardice that does seem to have wound its tentacles around a party that will allow an Al Sharpton a legitimate place at its table.

So let's just tick off the ways that Dean has dealt with major issues lately. On race, he's a unidirectional pander bear--it's all whitey's fault. On God and guns, well, he's a mute. Doesn't want to talk about them, even though the Constitution does, and, well, being president has a thing or two to do with Constitutional law. But he's open to Southerners with Confederate flags in their trucks, so long as they don't care about all that "values" stuff, because Dean wants to leave values out of presidential politics. But don't fight him on something as important as a bike path, or he just might up and change religions. On the war, he's agin' it, doesn't think it's accomplishing much, and grins when asked about the deaths of American soldiers fighting to free Iraq. Oh, and his earliest followers flirted with calling themselves the "Dean fedayeen," identifying themselves with the very forces fighting against US troops in Iraq.

So my question to Dean is--when are you going to educate yourself? Because from where I stand, you sure need a crash course in race relations, in foreign policy, in Constitutional law, in the role of religion in American life, and in public relations.