Salon’s recent debasement of American literature as represented by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth is hilarious reading for Americans who are people of color, especially in my view American Indians. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the giants of American literature aren’t worthy of such an honor, I am in agreement with Salon that these American giants are “insular and self-involved.”

They are, but what’s worse — they are fearful, fearful of writing about and engaging in race. Europeans, Asians, Africans, American people of color, and virtually everyone else sees how truly pathetic American discourse on race has become. Derrick Bell’s passing reminds us how far Americans have to go before they can confront the undeniably racialized origins of the United States. Derrick Bell, who would have fit in well in the pantheon of Nobel winners (in either literature or peace), talked about race in a way most white Americans simply will not do. Americans was colorblindness, they want neutrality, and they certainly don’t want comeuppance.

American literature, or what Salon views as a canon or sorts (exclusively white authors), is weak on race. Probably the best novel on race by Salon’s stable of worthy-ish writers is Roth’s The Human Stain. It’s good, but it’s not really a direct engagement on race. First, it’s set on campus at a liberal arts college, maybe the whitest place around, and a frequent safe ground for American writers. Second, it’s not really about race. It’s about a white guy who finds out he’s black. And he suffers horribly for it. That’s the best Americans can do?

Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich have been writing about race for decades. They confront the question of race head on. They’re honest about it, especially Alexie. Americans are racists. So are American Indians, and blacks, and Latino/as, and Asians. We all are, and American literature runs from that reality, trying to avoid it, or cover it up. Derrick Bell didn’t run from it. He dealt with it. Alexie writes about Indians in white communities, Indians who sold out to join white America and how they can’t go back home, and Indians who hate whites so much they kill them. Erdrich writes about mixed race people of every stripe you can find in the northern plains. She adds the element of gender that’s beautiful and powerful and nasty.

America’s “canon,” the people Salon deems worthy of discussion, just don’t do any of these things. Maybe they wouldn’t know how. The Nobel committee will award the Prize to someone like Alexie or Erdrich, just as they did Toni Morrison in 1993. And the American literary establishment will spend the next two decades wondering why no American has won. Really.