Politics & Power Quote by Eric Holder

Holder’s sentence is doing two jobs at once: diagnosing a civic illness and quietly assigning responsibility for it. Written in the careful, prosecutorial cadence of a public servant, the repetition of “though” functions like a pair of legal stipulations: yes, race is already everywhere in politics; yes, the problems are still real. Having granted those premises, he pivots to the more uncomfortable claim - that the volume of “discussion” isn’t the same as the substance of “talk.”

The key phrase is “average Americans.” It’s an appeal that sidesteps partisan elites and cable-news combatants, implying that the loudest racial arguments are often performed for audiences rather than had between neighbors. “Simply do not talk enough with each other” sounds gentle, even commonsensical, but it carries an indictment: avoidance is bipartisan, widespread, and domesticated. The subtext is that America can litigate race in courtrooms, legislatures, and elections, yet still fail at the basic interpersonal work that makes policy durable - empathy, candor, and the willingness to hear what you won’t hear on your own.

Context matters: Holder, as Attorney General in the Obama era, spoke amid high-profile debates over policing, profiling, and a resurgent culture war about who gets to name racism and where it lives. His formulation tries to lower the temperature without minimizing the stakes. He frames racial conflict not as a shortage of opinions, but as a shortage of contact - a problem of civic intimacy in a country that can’t stop arguing about race and still can’t manage to talk about it.