Before I go join Drinking Liberally to watch tonight’s historic event, a few interesting items on race and the Democratic National Convention:

- Writing in The New York Times earlier this week, Alessandra Stanley notes that while one first was celebrated, another was almost swept under the rug: “Tuesday night was tailored to pay homage to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s barrier-breaking near-miss, yet there was no overt celebration of the bull’s-eye: Barack Obama is poised to be the first African-American presidential nominee.”

Of course, that’s all likely to change tonight — and to be clear, Stanley notes that it’s not so much that the sentiment is missing, but that the campaign has kept such references to a minimum: “While African-Americans on the convention floor — and in the commentators’ booth — express feelings of pride and exhilaration, convention organizers design the pageantry on the air to mute racial distinctions and veil novelty, focused it seems, on reassuring those white viewers who find the 2008 spectacle jarringly different from past ones.”

Surely being told of Michelle Obama’s appreciation for the “Brady Bunch” was part of the calculation. Yet the genuine excitement on the floor of the convention, as well as the diversity of this year’s delegates, is obvious to anyone glued to C-SPAN.

But this is the part in Stanley’s piece that was the real stunner:

Obviously, race is a tripwire topic for television, as Chris Matthews of MSNBC demonstrated all too irrepressibly on Tuesday.

Mr. Matthews said the Obamas are “like the Huxtables,” and praised Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Obama as exceptional role models: “They do everything right. They have great kids, they work their hearts off, they make it in their professions, they don’t live off welfare, they don’t commit crimes, they don’t live on affirmative action.”

His two African-American guests, the seasoned television personalities Ed Gordon and Jeff Johnson, gave him a skeptical look but did not comment.

Plus: Novelist Kim McLarin argues that Michelle Obama’s presence on stage at the convention may be even more transcendent than her husband’s.

- Dawn Turner Trice, a Chicago Tribune columnist who also leads the Exploring Race forum on the paper’s website, has been keeping the discussion going from Denver this week (she’s in row 20 right now at the stadium). Here she asks readers what it means to be an American in the context of race; more here.

- Over at Black Voices, Branden Cobb asks if the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., has been fulfilled. Rep. John Lewis fielded a similar question during a discussion with Michele Norris that aired on “All Things Considered” this evening.

- The DNC has put together this table (PDF) showing the gender and race breakdown of the delegates for all conventions between 1984 and 2008. This year, women came out slightly ahead of men for the first time ever. About 44 percent of the delegates are minorities. For the past three conventions, the DNC has also logged the percentage of delegates who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, and delegates with disabilities — this year it’s 6 percent and 4 percent respectively.

-Here’s Spike Lee making perhaps the most apt assessment of the meaning of Obama’s nomination, defining it in terms of “BB” and “AB”: