After endur­ing two painful hours watch­ing “Obama’s Amer­ica: 2010 and Beyond” on MSNBC last night, I had two dis­tinct thoughts. The first was, “That was two hours of my life I’ll never get back.” The sec­ond, and more impor­tant rumi­na­tion, was that this is pre­cisely why I have tired of orches­trated dis­cus­sions on race.

In case you missed it, you can catch clips of the show here. I am happy to save you the time of watch­ing by sum­ming it up this way.

Per­haps if you haven’t engaged, attended, or par­tic­i­pate in one of these race dia­logue pro­duc­tions, you may have learned a thing or two. How­ever, for the trained ear, this was yet another cir­cu­lar conversation–replete with the same old sound bites, sta­tis­tics, and uncom­fort­able jokes. To me, it’s just speechi­fy­ing. In fair­ness, I could have been fatigued from lis­ten­ing to a lot of the same the night before. A guy I came across on Twit­ter, who writes a really good blog called Aver­age Bro, was par­tic­i­pat­ing in an online radio dis­cus­sion about Obama’s first year in office. There were a few peo­ple inter­ested in look­ing at issues from all angles, but over­all it felt like most of the dis­cus­sion was guided by rules. Rules of what is con­sid­ered accept­able black thought. If you even appear to drift off script, your’re labeled or mar­gin­al­ized. One woman called in and sug­gested Obama doesn’t, and can’t, con­nect with “every­day” black peo­ple because he attended Ivy League schools. All together now…UGH!

That brings me to the dri­ver for this post. I am increas­ingly frus­trated with rules of engage­ment when dis­cussing race. Sev­eral I had to opt out of the con­ver­sa­tion because it just became unnerv­ing to talk end­lessly about race. I stepped down from the diver­sity com­mit­tee I sat on at my son’s school because I got “diver­si­tied out.” I got sick of polite con­ver­sa­tions. We never seemed to get to the root causes of racial divisions.

In an attempt to keep this post from going on for pages, here’s my thing. I think if we are ever going to get some­where on race (and just about any other issue), we need to have some hon­est con­ver­sa­tions with some action items attached at the end. We need to shift this cookie cut­ter approach of hav­ing panel dis­cus­sions with bull­shit Q&A time after all the pan­elists orate for 80% of the allot­ted time. I actu­ally think small con­ver­sa­tions on race would be more effec­tive. Maybe that could be a national initiative.

My con­cern is that peo­ple sit through or watch these orches­trated “dis­cus­sions” and feel are no closer to under­stand­ing what divides and/or unites us than they were when the talk­ing started.  To me, I would find it much more instruc­tive to an hon­est and can­did account of what an Asian woman feels about her expe­ri­ence with black peo­ple. Is this expe­ri­ence iso­lated, or shared by oth­ers within the Asian com­mu­nity. Like­wise, I wish blacks would just go ahead and say what is said about whites. “You know how white folks are.”

Let’s pull down the veils of polite­ness and get stuff out on the table so we can deal with it hon­estly. Clearly there needs to be thick skin, because reac­tions and tem­pers flar­ing to slights (real or per­ceived) only serves to derail any advance­ment of understanding.

Maybe I’m just get­ting older, because there once was a time when I was obsessed with race, and tended to see race behind just about every aspect of day-to-life. Now? I am not as quick to assume race is behind every action, reac­tion or com­ment. Don’t get me wrong, I still see stuff and prob­a­bly am much more prone to just say what I’m think­ing. Some­times I sur­prise peo­ple with my can­dor. Other times, I annoy peo­ple for reveal­ing what’s con­sid­ered dirty laundry.

In the end, sit­ting on my hands, bit­ing my tongue, and being polite does noth­ing to break a cycle of igno­rance and mis­un­der­stand­ing. We would ben­e­fit from break­ing from the habit of talk­ing to the same peo­ple all the time. Let’s engage some new peo­ple of dif­fer­ent races and eth­nic­i­ties. And, here’s a twist, try talk­ing about any­thing and every­thing other than race.