I like Whoopi Goldberg. I caught her in a very sweet and strange moment ten years ago when she was madly in love with the actor Frank Langella (see the story in my Stories section, Whoopi, Frankly). They told me they were "like two broken toys trying to fix each other." I liked her standing up for herself, which she doesn't always, yesterday on The View (where she is often muted in the white-tiled, bathroom-tissue-colored scenery of the discussions there, and often resorts to making coded background faces) telling ubiquitous bimbo-fascist Elisabeth Hasselbeck, in the middle of a debate on the use of the so-called "n-word,"

"We do live in different worlds. I'm sorry, it's the way it is."

Somebody had to say it. Obama had us all feeling like we were all done with that racism stuff, there, for a second. Which feels good.

But it ain't true. As New Jersey Governor David Paterson pointed out in a speech to the NAACP yesterday, "The gap between the haves and have-nots right in our own community is wider than it has ever been before."

But nobody's talking much about civil rights, these days. Not when there's a "war on terror" to fight, and an oil tanker full of money to spend on some phantom, dark-skinned enemy over there...

Civil rights scholars call it "race fatigue"—the unwillingness of whites to confront racism, because, well, they're just tired of it! Can't those "n-words" stop complaining already?!

Which is also known, in sociological circles, as "modern racism"—a more covert but often just as pernicious form of racial prejudice, characterized by all sorts of strange permutations, such as blonde TV talk show hosts insisting on how black people should use the English language—"because it hurts children!"—and, perhaps, magazine covers depicting black presidential candidates as Islamic terrorists...