Yeah I saw you try, very patiently, to get the black guest to admit that your imaginary Possibility #5 was viable in the Gates incident - that NO ONE was at fault. You and Mika are so desperate to absolve all white people from having a racial BASIS, not even a bias but a BASIS, that you're willing to let Professor Gates "off the hook" too.
How very generous of your narcissism.
It is not possible to have a completely neutral schema. Our eyes, wired by our biology, SEE COLOR and we have been taught to react certain ways to it, whether those ways are positive, negative, or outcome-neutral. Further, race DOES enter into virtually every aspect of this culture because of the slave ships that brought African slaves here in the 1600's.
Did I sail the ships? Nope. Do I have to live with the consequences of that deleterious act? Yup.
Should my white sons be shamed and scolded because the white men who took this continent away from indigenous Americans chose to enslave Africans to build it? Nope. Should my white sons be aware that all of that occurred so they can make damn sure it never happens again? Yup.
Is every person a racist? Nope. Does everyone have a racial bias? Nope, and fewer and fewer of those biases end in terribly negative consequences.
Does everyone have a racial basis? Yup, and as much as you, Joe, would like to teach Mika how to handle "her journalistic self" so that she can coerce guests into agreeing with your whitewashed version/vision of America, it won't happen. Too many of your guests, especially your favored guests, have proven your position invalid. Please let go, Joe, and move on. Lean more to the information side of The Force, and leave the comedy to Stewart and Colbert.
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You write, "Our eyes, wired by our biology, SEE COLOR and we have been taught to react certain ways to it . . ." I would actually argue that although our eyes have biological wiring, we are also taught to see color. I remember my son in kindergarden giving more nuanced descriptions of kids than our own adult classificatory schemes permit. "No, Papi, he's not black. He's brown." Later, "What did G---- mean when she said you Germans killed the Jews?"
Long story short, by the first grade, most of the children in his DC public school had the vocabulary they needed to function in our adult world, and they had some idea of the history that went with it, but it remained abstract until children started leaving the public school for private schools, a process that ran from the fourth through the sixth grade, depending on the family and how hard the private school was to get into. By high school the mix of race and class and gender that informs adult perceptions was fully operative, even if many draw different conclusions about the relative significance of these factors than their parents do.
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