Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
- Former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez is one of California’s most gifted politicians; filmmaker Spike Lee is a remarkable American artist. This week, both of them made utter fools of themselves, and understanding exactly how they did so tells us something important about where we are as a people and as a country.
There was a time, not long ago, when the worst hypocrisy in American public life was the pretense that race and ethnicity somehow didn’t matter. But that’s not the case any more. Although race is still a factor in our national life, it’s hardly a deterministic one and, today, there are few fallacies more corrosive than the assertion that only race matters.
