Race makes people crazy, but often not in the way you’d expect. A nation watched wide-eyed as Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC complained that the Star Wars franchise was racist because the major villain is “black.†Darth Vader is black in the sense that Johnny Cash or Ben Roethlisberger or certain figures from Arthurian legend are “black†— white guys in black outfits — so people kept waiting for Harris-Perry, “America’s foremost public intellectual,†to crack and let us know that she was joking. But she wasn’t joking. One cannot imagine what she’d make of that Adolf Hitler/Darth Vader episode of...
