Wall Street Journal and Election '08

I try to keep up with the news in the US by reading what sources I can online. One of the articles I read today about the elections regarding race bothered me... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120044560487392853.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. I mean, I know that its just a commentary, but I think that the stance that the writer takes is a bit extreme. I think people are sensitive about race for a good reason, and the writer simply writes it off.

I don't think there is anything wrong with what Hillary said, and I agree that people are making a big deal out of nothing, but when the author states that

"To be able to hold in one's mind the notion that Mrs. Clinton would attack King suggests a bone-deep hypersensitivity that overrides sequential reasoning. "We have to be very, very careful how we speak about that era," Rep. Clyburn explains.
But why so very, very careful? What effect does it have on anyone's life if that era is occasionally discussed in less than perfectly genuflective phraseology?... There is a willful frailty, a lack of self-confidence, in this kind of thinking. It suggests someone almost searching for things to claim injury about, donning the mantle of the noble victim in order to assuage a bruised ego."

I agree with McWhorter that the reaction is a reflection of insecurity, but contrary to his suggestions, I believe that these insecurities are not unreasonable. or unfounded Racism is a sensitive topic because of the history behind it, and because people continue to experience racism and other forms of discrimination on a daily basis. It is because of racist and discriminatory experiences that minorities encounter in nearly every aspect of life that they develop a sensitivity to this issue. I don't think people "don the mantle of noble victim" if they haven't been discriminated against in their personal lives. People only become sensitive to such issues (and in some cases, hypersenstive) only when they have been impacted by discrimination, and such a reaction shouldn't be so easily written off. It is unrealistic to believe that racism is a resolved issue when the civil rights movement only occurred less than 50 years ago, and such a reaction is only an indicator that much more progress is to be made in this arena.