This has been a week of racial matters. The Republicans, a political organization whose recent racial deeds would make Frederick Douglass swell with pride, parsed, parsed, and parsed some more Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina speech.”

For some in the GOP that speech shows how she is out to make whites the mules of the world. El Rushbo, Rush Limbaugh, peddled that the nominee, and President Barack Obama, are bitter angry coloreds waiting to get back at whitey. For the record: Rush comes from the school of philosophy where the coloreds are now racist. Folks of his skin tone are bigotry free.

It would have been nice if someone in the Grand Old Party looked at Sotomayor’s dissent in Pappas v. Giuliani. Pappas was a racist, anti-Semite, and worked for the New York Police Department’s information division. His bigotry was discovered by his superiors because he sent private emails, from his home, to organizations extolling his kookiness. They canned his racist butt and he sued. The case made it to the Second Court of Appeals, Sotomayor’s court, and you would think this pissed off brown woman would gladly take a knife to Pappas. Isn’t that what those Sharks do? Alas she defended his right of free speech. Bad move Judge. Not the way a sassy Latina is supposed to act.

The day Sotomayor stopped testifying, the man who picked her was talking to the NAACP. The civil rights organization turned 100 this year and in many ways Obama’s road to the White House fulfills the dream of the organization’s founders ( to be fair, I can imagine cantankerous W.E.B. DuBois giving Obama tons of grief).

The speech was standard Obama. Marveling at the country’s history, the travels and travails of the civil rights movement, some personal tales, and an admonishment for personal responsibility. Smarter heads have noticed that Obama has a habit of going the personal responsibility route when he talks to predominately black audiences. When he takes it there, the media goes gaga like it’s something new; however, the media is clueless to race and history. Anyone who knows a smidgen of American history knows the bootstrap rhetoric has been flourished by Ida B. Wells to Huey P. Newton. Heck, spend anytime listening to a number of black preachers and it’s hard not to hear a rhetoric of individual commitment.

Shelby Steele made a great point ages ago that race conversations in America were stymied because everyone wants to be innocent. Whites act as history has no meaning and blacks think history is all there is. So we spout predictable positions (“Sotomayor is a racist” or “If you don’t like Sotomayor you are a racist”) and simmer in our own moral stew about the perfidy of the other side. We served ourselves the same meal this week, learning and hearing nothing. Hopefully one day we can talk about race and how it’s lived minus the comfortable blankets that have little with our actual lives.