In other words, in this context a “conversation” on race means listening to blacks telling whites what would be acceptable to say or even think, lest we be “ignorant.” Great.

Back to Holder, who’s supposed to be the country’s “top cop.” Instead he’s concerned with just whom Americans are hanging around with. “Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not in some ways differ significantly from the country that existed almost 50 years ago,” Holder claimed. But that’s incorrect.

The untold story of race relations in the United States is how much things have improved, not how bad things are. Let’s look at Holder’s window of 50 years. In 1959, (within living memory for many Americans) there were segregated restaurants in many states. Blacks had only been allowed to play major league baseball for 12 years and NBA basketball for nine. The idea of blacks and whites playing golf together on courses in the south seemed absurd. Today it’s routine.

In fact, today when the issue of race comes up, it’s often because someone is nakedly trying to use it to advance a political position. A few weeks back Roland Burris and some fellow Illinois Democrats held a news conference to explain why Burris deserved a seat in Congress. “There are no African-Americans in the U.S. Senate,” warned Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush ominously.

Indeed there weren’t -- simply because our supposedly racist country had just elected a black man out of the Senate and made him president.

Perhaps Holder was simply following in the satirical footsteps of The Onion. “African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America,” the mock newspaper wrote immediately after the election. “The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.”

So, April Fool. Unless he was kidding, Eric Holder is the real joke here.