Most U.S. media coverage of the U.N. racism conference held in Durban, South Africa last week, and the Bush Administration's abandonment of it, centered on two issues: whether Zionism is racist, and whether colonialism and slavery require an apology and reparations. Since agreement on these two issues was exceedingly unlikely, pundits had an easy time calling the conference a failure, and the Bush withdrawal justified.

But it is the United States' failure, not the conference's, which should raise eyebrows. This was the third such U.N. racism conference. The first two were devoted to talk; this one was to be devoted to action, with participating countries asked to come away with a plan for addressing racial inequities in their own countries. This is something nobody in the United States -- Republican or Democrat -- has, in modern history, been willing to discuss in any kind of comprehensive, honest, inclusive way. Race in the United States isn't simply something the White House ran away from in Durban; it is something just about every government official in the United States continues to run away from on a more or less daily basis.

Biologists, anthropologists, and social scientists are pretty much in agreement these days: race is not a matter of biology so much as a social construct. The differences in DNA between peoples of different skin color (and related features) are far less consequential than any number of other distinguishing characteristics that have no social consequences whatsoever. Given what the science is telling us, the fact that "race" -- however it is defined -- permeates nearly every aspect of American life cries out for a unified, comprehensive approach to ensuring that peoples of all races are not discriminated against, and that policies work toward a day, now rather distant, when race in our country truly does not matter.

Nobody is thinking in such terms: a "Race Czar," a Cabinet-level "Department of Racial Equality," a Marshall Plan for race, or whatever it would take to bring educational opportunities, job opportunities, health care, imprisonment levels, and all of the other indices of modern American discrimination into some sort of equity.

To this end, the slavery reparations debate is a counter-productive distraction. Although reparations advocates explain that payback is necessary precisely because the impact of slavery continues, for most people it's a debate over an initiative that's never going to be adopted that would acknowledge a 140-year-old injustice. Such a debate distracts from the very real and ongoing problems today; the genius of David Horowitz's campus anti- reparations ads (which did more to publicize the reparations movement than anything advocates had done) was that it took people's eyes off the prize.

That's precisely what the Bush Administration wanted, too; defending their thuggish allies was simply a bonus for the real advantage to pulling out of Durban, which was to avoid not just having a conversation on an uncomfortable topic, but to avoid being asked to make a domestic policy commitment. Bill Clinton's conversations on race were a fine idea, but with the other hand, policies like the War on Drugs and welfare "reform" simultaneously deepened America's racial chasm -- showing just how far we have to go before even personally sympathetic politicians, most of whom live lives of great privilege, "get it." That chasm won't be bridged until we start talking about the issue as a social construct; start acknowledging the very real consequences; start looking at ways to dismantle the policies that reinforce them; and start taking action to comprehensively repair the damage.

Nothing less will do.