Why conservatives don't like to talk about race

The third reason is that conservatives are suspicious of the overarching liberal narrative on race. Taxes, deficits, whether to go to war with country X or not — these are narrowly defined issues with widely accepted parameters. By contrast, some narratives about race make it the all-encompassing issue that has driven, drives, and will drive all public policy, and which can only be ameliorated through radical changes in the socio-political order. It doesn’t have to be this way, but this tendency creates an impression in the minds of many conservatives that to buy even one piece of the narrative is to buy all the narrative.

There are also some bad reasons why conservatives don’t like to talk about race.

Just because the left fits the story of racism within an all-encompassing narrative doesn’t mean that the right has to choose between granting the point and selling its soul. For instance, it’s enormously frustrating when the left calls attention to problem X, and proposes misguided public policy Y in response; and the right, instead of criticizing the misguided public policy and offering a better alternative, simply vociferously denies that X is a problem. We see this with the minimum wage and, paradigmatically, global warming. The right should be able to grant — as it does on its best days — that, yes, structural racism is a real thing — but the best way to combat it is through conservative public policy.

The second bad reason is what you might call insensitivity. Consider Barro’s Law: “Conservatives so often get unfairly pounded on race because, so often, conservatives get fairly pounded on race.”