"Conversation About Race" Has Not Brought Cultural Consensus The "conversation about race" that public figures periodically claim to desire, the one that is always either about to happen or is being prevented from happening, has been going on, at full volume, at least since the day in 1619 when the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown. It has proceeded through every known form of discourse - passionate speeches, awkward silences, angry rants, sheepish whispers, jokes, insults, stories and songs - and just as often through double-talk, indirection and not-so-secret codes. What are we really talking about, though? The habit of referring to it as "race" reflects a tendency toward euphemism and abstraction. Race is a biologically dubious concept and a notoriously slippery social reality, a matter of group identity and personal feelings, mutual misunderstandings and the dialectic of giving and taking offense. If that is what we are talking about, then we are not talking about the historical facts that continue to weigh heavily on present circumstances, which is to say about slavery, segregation and white supremacy. But of course we are still talking about all that, with what seems like renewed concentration and vigor. Nor, in a year that is the sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address and the semicentennial of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, are we simply looking back at bygone tragedies from the standpoint of a tranquil present. The two big racially themed movies of the year, "Lee Daniels" The Butler" and Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave," are notable for the urgency and intensity with which they unpack stories of the past, as if delivering their news of brutal bondage and stubborn discrimination for the first time. Francois Duhamel/Fox Searchlight Pictures "12 Years a Slave," directed by Steve McQueen, with, from left, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o and Chiwetel Ejiofor. And one of the strange effects of this country's anxious, confused, hopeful and delusional relationship to its history of racism is that such narratives often do feel like news, or like efforts to overcome willful amnesia. The astonishing experiences of Solomon Northup, Mr. McQueen's protagonist, a free man from Saratoga, N.Y., who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South in 1841, are not being presented to the American public for the first time. Northup's memoir was an antebellum best seller, nearly as widely circulated in abolitionist circles as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." A screen adaptation, directed by Gordon Parks and starring Avery Brooks in the title role (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in Mr. McQueen's version), was broadcast on PBS in 1984. A scene from the mini-series "Roots" (1977) based on the novel by Alex Haley, with LeVar Burton. Some of the film's representations of cruelty - whippings, hangings, the sexual abuse of a young female slave named Patsey by her sadistic master - will also stir the memories of those Americans (like me) for whom "Roots" was a formative cultural experience. In 1977, when the mini-series, based on Alex Haley's book, was first broadcast, it was heralded not only for its authenticity and comprehensiveness, but also for its newness. This was the first time such a story had been told in such breadth and detail, and with so much assembled talent. It continued, two years later, with "Roots: The Next Generations," which was in some ways more groundbreaking for bringing attention to the often neglected decades of struggle and frustration that fell between the end of the Civil War and the birth of the modern civil rights movements. Such stories, of course, do not stay told. The moral, economic and human realities of slavery - to keep the narrative there for a moment - have a way of getting buried and swept aside. For a long time this was because, at the movies as in the political and scholarly mainstream, slavery was something of a dead letter, an inconvenient detail in a narrative of national triumph, a sin that had been expiated in the blood of Northern and Southern whites.