“The man went on: ‘I’ve been trying to find an answer to a question, and I haven’t found it in any books. In World War II, when Hitler killed the Americans and the British and the French and the Jews, what race killed them?’ It took me a half-second to untangle the question, but even before I did I got that jolt of neck-sweat that signals dangerous territory ahead. In America, when a person of one race says the word ‘race’ to a person of another race, you start phrasing your sentences very carefully.”
