30 Issues: Race, Beyond Affirmative Action

Charles Blow, New York Times's visual Op-Ed columnist, and Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center and author of America Against the World : How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (Times Books, 2006), review American attitudes toward race, as evidence by polling.

Then
Dr. Cornel West, the Class of 1943 Professor at Princeton University, author of Race Matters, and most recently, Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom, (Hay House, 2008) and Maria Hinojosa, managing editor and host of NPR's Latino USA and senior correspondent for the PBS newsmagazine NOW, and Abigail Thernstrom, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, the vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and co-author with her husband of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, October 2003), discuss the state of race relations in the U.S.

Then
Spoken word artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai asks why in "national conversations about race" the viewpoints of Asian Americans often are left out.

What specific topics should a national conversation about race include? Comment below!