Someone should have walked out of the room over this.

Last week when President George W. Bush cobbled together a handpicked group of black religious and community leaders for a chat at the White House, he tried to sell them on his plan to add private accounts to Social Security. But while Bush has used youth as a way to sell the plan to people who have come of age after the 1970s and who believe, erroneously, that there will be no money left for them once they hit retirement age, for blacks, he is using another sales pitch: Death.

Bush said, in essence, that blacks will benefit from his plan because they die sooner than whites, and because of that, they end up paying more into the system than what they get out of it.

At that point, the atmosphere in the room should have shifted from one of congeniality to one of concern and outrage. I mean, here’s the president telling black folks, in a nutshell, that their shortened lives – lives shortened by racism and lack of access to decent health care and other essentials – is something that they ought to look at cashing in on rather than trying to change.

But judging from news reports, no one in that crowd caught the insult.   And that’s a shame. Or am I being too sensitive??