I was not shocked by Richards’s outburst, and I don’t believe many other African-Americans were, either. We know racism exists both from our own experiences and from the world around us. In California, Mel Gibson was caught in a drunken anti-Semitic rant during a police stop just four months ago. In Virginia, George Allen helped the Republicans lose the Senate when he called one of his opponent’s staffers–a young volunteer of Indian descent–a “macaca,” which is a genus of mon-key and is considered by many to be a racial slur. In Tennessee, an anti-Harold Ford Jr. ad featuring a blonde white woman leeringly saying “Harold, call me” was widely seen as racist.

The sweeping story of race in America is, to say the very least, not a happy one. The politics of black and white really began nearly 400 years ago, when, in 1619, Virginia settlers took delivery of slaves from a Dutch man-of-war. In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln, who did not run as an abolitionist, barely won the presidency, America had 4 million slaves. A century later the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts finally defeated Jim Crow–or at least got the Jim Crow laws off the books. Hearts were (and are) another matter. In 1992, L.A. burned; two weeks ago Michigan voted to ban affirmative action in public employment and in education and state contracts.

Political history, however, is not always the same as personal history; my own story tells a more complex tale than an “Eyes on the Prize” march through the American saga. In 1937, my maternal grandmother and her family (including her seven brothers) moved north from Sanford, Fla., to Connecticut for better opportunities, and because they feared that a black man could never be safe in the South. In 1947, my father was born more than a month premature, and because he was in South Carolina and black, he was thought to be as good as dead. He didn’t die, but that was because he was lucky–not because Strom Thurmond, who was about to run for president as a Dixiecrat, was devoted to providing health care to all his constituents. Now, as a Yale graduate and NEWSWEEK staffer, able to travel, work and play just about anywhere I please, let me be the first to tell you that I know progress has been made–I am its example.

To use Michael Richards’s Laugh Factory meltdown as an occasion to discuss one of the most tangled and solemn issues in American life is a little like unleashing the Powell Doctrine on a Brownie troop, but pop-culture moments often provide us with opportunities to talk about things that don’t otherwise get talked about outside think tanks or university seminars. (“Murphy Brown” and Dan Quayle, Ellen DeGeneres and gay rights, or anything Norman Lear has ever done on TV are examples.)

I like living in a world where calling people the “N word” isn’t tolerated, but the rules of political correctness that make Richards’s outburst so shocking to so many have not eliminated racism–such conventions (“African-American,” anyone?) have just given prejudice a place to hide. Racism thrives in the dark, and it can’t help oozing out sometimes–when we are angry, or drunk, or desperate to win. With the ubiquity of cell-phone cameras (that’s what caught Richards) and streaming-video Web sites, we may see more once private revelations of racism winding up out in the open.

And that’s not a bad thing. Of course, it’s scary to confront race. Beyond polite conversational conventions, we don’t even have much of a shared vocabulary. It’s a lot easier to learn the P.C. rules than confront any biases you might find within. Many whites fear appearing to be a middle-of-the-movie Spencer Tracy if talk turns to crime rates or welfare; many blacks worry that they will sound like an Uncle Tom (if they are tough on other blacks) or a Stokely Carmichael (if they defend other blacks). So it’s come to this: only comedians will name our fears–Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes, Sarah Silverman and Dave Chappelle make people laugh by saying out loud what we’re scared to acknowledge we might even think.

Debating “n—–” is just another way to keep our eyes off the prize. If we want to condemn Michael Richards, why not have a go at his opener: “Fifty years ago they’d have you upside down with a [expletive] fork up your a–.” Let’s be shocked that he referred to a time when black people were hanged from trees and burned for crimes outside of the due process of the law and sometimes for reasons so slight that there might as well have been none.

Martin Luther King Jr.–himself attacked in his lifetime for being both too radical and too accommodationist–once said: “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life.” To make that transformation, we need to stop saying that all this talk of people’s color is behind us. It isn’t. If we’re going to talk about race, let’s talk about the victims of Hurricane Katrina or poverty.

Before we rush off to the next scandal–and there will be a next one–let me offer up one more quotation, this one from Lincoln’s first Inaugural, in 1861: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Here’s hoping those angels can find the time to drop by the Laugh Factory.