As John Mayer’s racially charged comments in a Playboy magazine interview ricocheted around the racketball court that is the Internet this week, I found myself exhausted by the sad reality that the national dialogue on race remains driven by the engine of celebrity gaffes and gotcha moments. Our voracious, ADHD-afflicted news cycle castigates, forgives and…

I watched Barack Obama’s “Toward A More Perfect Union” in my living room, on a laptop computer with tinny speakers. Like millions of other Americans, I felt a surge of amazement, a sense of expanding possibility, at the sheer fact that a black man with a good chance of becoming president was speaking about race…