hen you get right down to it, do Americans really want to talk about race?
Do they really value leadership on racial unity as a quality in their next president?
Former US senator Bill Bradley fervently wants to believe that the answer to those questions is yes. He wants to believe that race - more often associated with political division than unity - can be one pillar of a successful presidential campaign.
''If I'm wrong, I'm toast,'' Bradley conceded earlier this week in an interview at the Globe. ''But if I'm right, then we've got a possibility of really making something important happen.''
The former New Jersey senator's liberal platform strikes some observers as opportunistically at odds with his political record. But, regardless, he stands out in the 2000 presidential field for his eagerness to embrace an issue that most candidates avoid addressing directly.
''I believe that the president has the unique role to challenge people to honor their better selves,'' he says. ''Sometimes that means talking about things that are unpleasant to people.''
It also means, he believes, rebuilding the multiracial civil rights coalition that has been on the wane since the 1960s. In his 1996 memoirs, ''Time Present, Time Past,'' he is bitterly critical of former president George Bush and others for exploiting race in cynical but successful attempts to woo white voters. Bradley prefers to believe that some of those same voters can be engaged on issues that cut across ethnic lines and can be recruited for a new involvement in racial dialogue.
To his mind, the coalitions of the past were founded on clear injustices and specific remedies. He believes both still exist, and cites the number of children living in poverty as an example.
But the cause of children in poverty is probably an easier sell than getting voters to acknowledge the injustice of what he calls ''white skin privilege,'' the advantages whites hold simply because they are white.
''A white mother doesn't think in the middle of the night she's going to get a call from her 17-year-old son because he got stopped in some place where he was doing nothing, driving while black,'' Bradley says.
He explains that he does not mean to vilify whites but to illuminate a different reality. ''That doesn't mean that you're accusing people of racism; you're not. What you're doing is saying, this is a reality we have to come to terms with. A president, I think, has the capacity to push our collective humanity forward, if he's willing to put his political capital on the line.''
The former basketball star claims a long engagement with race. From his boyhood in Crystal City, Mo., to his post-college days as a volunteer in Harlem, to his years in the NBA, the notion of difference has been seared into his psyche.
In discussing race, Bradley leans heavily on his experience. His time in basketball - as a white player in what was then rapidly becoming a predominantly black league - left him with his first taste of life as an outsider, he has often said, reinforcing a strong liberal bent.
Stressing personal history is the trend. It's politics-as-talk-show, a way of connecting with potential voters who don't really care about politics. Obviously the impact of race in politics goes far beyond whatever Bradley may have learned at the elbows of Willis Reed and Walt Frazier. Increasingly, as Bradley grasps, racial policy is urban policy, influencing housing, unemployment, and a host of issues.
Some observers argue that, after three terms in the Senate, his record on issues he now claims to hold to his core was undistinguished. His signature achievement as a senator was the Tax Reform Bill of 1986, scorned by its critics as exacerbating the chasm between rich and poor.
He faces a major challenge in wooing minority voters away from Vice President Al Gore, who is presumed to be the beneficiary of President Clinton's enormous support among blacks. In one poll of black voters conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 42 percent of those polled had never heard of Bradley.
Even if he loses, Bradley is making a contribution on this difficult subject - and could continue to do so after the election. His willingness to stake a campaign on making people uncomfortable is a positive step in making race a force for political unity rather than its more familiar opposite.
Adrian Walker's e-mail address is walker@globe.com
