I have little intellectual and virtually no emotional investment in protecting the vague concept of "liberalism" or those or practice it, which, if you're a regular reader, you already know. It is, then, with no oversensitivity or wounded feelings that I venture that Ta-Nehisi Coates' observation is flatly unfair:
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," John Roberts elegantly wrote. Liberals have yet to come up with a credible retort. That is because the theories of John Roberts are prettier that the theories of most liberals. But more, it is because liberals do not understand that America has never discriminated on the basis of race (which does not exist) but on the basis of racism (which most certainly does.)
Roberts' line is "elegant" because it's simple-minded. It takes hundreds of years of history and mountains of sociological data and trashes them in a blindly economical 19 words. And it sells. It's bumper-sticker stuff. It's deliberate negligence that nonetheless comforts those wanting to deny reality.
On the other, more enlightened hand, there's Nietzsche's timeless aphorism: "That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." This leaves liberals with less than a "credible," pithy retort. There are some wrongs, some injustices for which mere words are not only inadequate, but impossible. Thus in the superficial game of rhetoric, reactionaries and racists will always have an edge--an edge that does not come from liberals' "misunderstanding" of discrimination.