disrespectable negroes.

I wrote an annoyed comment in response to we are respectable negroes.  Their responses annoyed me more, so I wrote this in response:

I don’t know where to start, possibly because I have the sense—though I might be wrong about this—that there’s a great deal of projection involved in both of your responses here.

The problem with white supremacy isn’t simply that it oppresses persons of color; it’s that the terms of that supremacy creep into the ways that we approach responding to incidents like this.  Perhaps you miss the irony, Gordon, in tacitly accuse my critique of “a soft liberal cultural white supremacy” while you freely throw around a term like “savage,” which has been a staple in white supremacist vocabulary for describing people of color for a good half a millennium now.

I actually didn’t say anything about violence being a “natural” response to a lack of privilege, so who knows where you’re getting that.  I’m not comfortable explaining the behavior about someone whose life I am not familiar with.  Both of you, however, seem perfectly happy to rush not only to judgment but to sweeping condemnation and sentencing when all you know about this is filtered entirely through the eyes of the victim.  How much information do you need before you call someone an “ign’t”?  Not only do you make no distinction ignorant behavior and ignorant person, but moreover, you make the essentially baseless claim that this is a “hate crime,” even as that question is given a far more thoughtful treatment in the article you cite.

Chauncey, if you don’t see that a pitbull trainer, who develops a close relationship with the dogs she or he trains, is a much different relationship than that white reporter who develops an empathetic relationship with a human community, I don’t know where to start.  Pitbulls know who their trainers are.  The attacker(s) didn’t know who this guy was.  The only thing that holds your analogy together is the implicit association of violent black people with brute animals, incapable of reflection.  Again, you conflate the act with the person.

Both of you seem to imply that I’m making excuses, which I categorically am not.  What I am doing, however, is putting the spotlight not on the crime itself but on your representation of it, which is, in my opinion, rivals the crime you describe in its hasty and unself-critical orientation.

I’m not the one extrapolating that someone lacks the ability to “uphold basic norms of human decency” from my knowledge of one violent act.  Y’all are talking like you know something fundamental and deep-seeded about this kid.

Negroes, please.  This bourgie black-on-black racism is so Clarence Thomas.