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Many people are afraid to talk about race because it's so emotionally loaded. We don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.

Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.

The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.

Race is used, by all of us, in the most manipulative ways, is often force-fit and reduced to something it isn't, to something that gives us a sense of comfort, a false one. Many of us thought - needed to feel - the whole business was 'settled.' But it's not, never has been. Laws have only taken us so far.

You've gotta respect everybody. If they race hard against you, you've got to race hard against them. It's very simple; if there's respect both ways, there's no problem.

Race in America has always centered on our mutual agreement not to see each other. White or non-white. Black or non-black. Mongoloid, Hindoo. We've always bought into to the crudest, humanity-denying forms of sorting.

I still think that we have a hesitance to talk about things racial. And I think we do it at our detriment. We go from incident to incident, and we have spikes in which race becomes something that we talk about, as opposed to talking about race in those less contentious times when I think we might make more progress.

We have the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it and drive wedges into people. And this does not need to be done.

It's a sad commentary when I have to say that sometimes in our country we are real sensitive to race.