MICHAEL MOORE, RACIST? Well, maybe not, but the American Prospect accuses him of racial blindness, at least:

My beef with Moore is this: He has managed to make a movie about gun violence in America — where 53 percent of the gun murder victims are black — without interviewing a single black victim of gun violence, or even asking black community leaders, who have spent decades successfully trying to combat the problem, for their insights. . . . He went to South Central in Los Angeles, to the very corner where the Los Angeles riots started in 1992 — but didn’t bother to ask that neighborhood’s black or Latino residents about their lives. Instead, he stood on a street corner, accompanied by Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear, who is also white, and said, in effect, Look how brave I am for coming here, and man, isn’t there a lot of smog? He spoke to a white Los Angeles Police Department officer. He spoke at length with a young white teen in Oscoda, Mich., who openly admittedly to selling stolen handguns to the folks in Detroit (where 395 people were murdered in 2001) but did not interview any of the people who were on the buying — and shooting — end of the transactions. How can you make what is essentially a movie about murder without speaking to murderers? . . .

Sure, it will be less glamorous to take on the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs over the more than 4,000 abandoned and neglected buildings that blight the city than it was to harass a stooped and elderly Charlton Heston at his Hollywood home. And it might not make you an international hero to challenge principals and teachers at persistently failing high schools — you know, the kind where half the students drop out and the ones that graduate at, say, age 21, can barely read or do simple math. But in the end, it might make a hell of a lot more difference.

Any guesses why Moore didn’t take this approach?