How else can one explain his lack of stoic, furrowed-eyebrow concern as he contemplates for National Review Online the frequent use of the phrase “That’s racist”?

I don’t want to overanalyze, but it seems as if everyone’s bending over backward to come up with the least obvious explanations for a pretty obvious joke.

For instance, here’s Ulaby again, talking about Hannibal Buress, a comedian and writer for NBC’s 30 Rock, who uses the phrase: “‘That’s racist’ works in comedy, Buress says, because it pushes buttons.” Okay. How does it push buttons? Why does it push buttons?

We’re never told. Instead, we get a NPR tutorial on the persistence of racism. “Scholar Regina Bradley says it also works because racism’s often expressed differently than from a generation or two ago,” Ulaby explains. “The segregated neighborhoods and swimming pools of Bradley’s grandparents have yielded to more subtle forms of discrimination. That’s reflected in how ‘that’s racist’ is being used — to shut down conversations or as a joke.”

But what’s the joke? We don’t find out until a 14-year-old-boy says it plainly: “I think I or other people just sort of do it as a way of mocking people who are overly sensitive about race issues.”

Bingo!

NPR could have done the whole story in 30 seconds. But instead it spent more than five minutes trying to grapple with a wonderful yet utterly inconvenient truth for the ostentatiously liberal network: Young people just aren’t as uptight about race as their parents, never mind their grandparents, are. And, by the way, the days of segregated swimming pools and neighborhoods haven’t merely “yielded” to “more subtle forms of discrimination”; they’ve yielded to — wait for it — less discrimination.

No, racism hasn’t vanished. And the legacy of racism has a long half-life.

But the simple fact is “that’s racist” is the sort of thing those darn kids today say to make fun of their aging Gen X and baby-boomer parents.