Avoiding such dialogues isn't cowardice; it's common sense.

Philadelphia Enquirer - Sun, Feb. 22, 2009 - By Kevin Ferris
Back Channels: Beware 'dialogue' on race
We are called on to overcome our fear. But better bring the right point of view.

Attorney General Eric Holder may get the dialogue on race that he called for Wednesday in a speech marking African American History Month. But the terms he offered are likely to promote division more than unity.
Holder's speech demonstrated the contradictions that doom these dialogues before they start. The most quoted - and dumbest - line from his speech is, "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."
Later in the speech, Holder said, "I fear . . . that we are taking steps that, rather than advancing us as a nation, are actually dividing us even further."
Where exactly does the "nation of cowards" remark fall - under advancing us or dividing us even further? I'd vote for the latter.
It's a bold choice of words for someone whose biggest claim to fame before taking his current job was failing to stand up to his boss, Bill Clinton, in the scandalous pardon of financier and fugitive Marc Rich.
And how oddly timed. The country just elected its first black president. No other nation in the world has ever elected to its highest office a member of a racial minority that was subject to legal segregation just 50 years earlier.
Yet this is a nation of cowards? Because average Americans aren't "comfortable enough with one another . . . to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us"? Our historic actions apparently don't speak louder than our lack of words. (continues...)