A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a “banana-eating jungle monkey” has apologized, saying he’s not a racist.

Ta-Nehishi Coates over at The Atlantic has had a lot of interesting things to say about the recent incident where a Boston police officer thought it was appropriate to arrest Prof. Henry Louis Gates for “disorderly conduct” because Gates had the temerity to question the officer’s actions. (The irony, of course, was that the officer’s most questionable action was the bogus arrest for disorderly conduct.) But among his most interesting observations is that no one admits to being racist except the hard-core supremacist types.

And so we get the unintentional comedy of a man apologizing for his racist remarks while desperately denying that he’s a racist — because our society only recognizes two types of racists: The Klansman, who admits it, and the closet racist, who publicly denies it. We don’t have a category for the self-proclaimed “good person” who occasionally lapses into unthinking prejudice, or who just isn’t self-aware.