Race Relations in America

One of the most common rhetorical tics employed by pundits when discussing Black Lives Matter, or in general conversations about racism, is the false equivalency term “race relations.” It implies that there’s a conflict between two equal parties who simply need to mend their differences—as opposed to one side (white supremacy) wielding power over the other (people of color).

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The New York Times’ most racially tone-deaf columnist, David Brooks, has spent decades belittling the threat of white supremacy and playing up the scourge of “political correctness.” In a recent screed against the rise of “identity politics” (11/18/16), he casually equated racists and those who fight them:

But it’s not only racists who reduce people to a single identity. These days it’s the anti-racists, too. To raise money and mobilize people, advocates play up ethnic categories to an extreme degree.

To extreme-center pundits like Brooks, joining together to fight your oppressors is just as bad as oppressing. By the same logic, hostages in a bank robbery plotting to overpower their captors are just as bad as the bank robbers themselves, since context and power dynamics are irrelevant to Brooks.

The New York Times’ own reporting isn’t much better. A December 8 piece about Trump fans needing “safe spaces” had this textbook example of runaway false equivalency:

Bias incidents on both sides have been reported. A student walking near a campus was threatened with being lit on fire because she wore a hijab. Other students were accused of being racist for supporting Mr.Trump, according to a campuswide message from March Schlissel, the university’s president.

Threatening violence against vulnerable populations is just like calling racists racist. Though the Times ended up changing the paragraph after a torrent of criticism on social media, the original paragraph perfectly captures the dangerous instinct to cry “both sides” in the face of wildly unequal power dynamics.

  Adam Johnson

All lives matter.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.