I Don't Usually Speak In Such Absolutist Terms

For most of human history, and certainly most of American history, identity was everything.

It was legal to prevent women from voting until 1920. It was legal to exclude black people from public life until 1965. And it was illegal to be homosexual in some states until 2003 (nope, I’m not talking about same-sex marriage, I’m talking about sexual relationships between same-sex partners).

But in my article, Everything Is Okay At All Times, And If You Disagree You’re A Bigot, I argued that in 2023, when we’re talking about a man struggling with severe mental illness and homelessness, maybe the colour of his skin isn’t the detail we should be focusing on.

Maybe we’d be able to better able to help people in his situation if we stopped pretending that the colour of his skin was the only reason the passengers were scared as he threatened to kill them.

Maybe it’s crass and frankly, moronic, to compare his situation to that of Emmet Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who was tortured and brutally murdered for, even if you believe the worst of what was said about him, whistling at a white woman on the street.

T disagreed.

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T:

Disgusting. A long, dreary, whiny walk through the author's bemoaning the loss of the privilege to ignore, or even promote the suffering of minorities. In Letter From A Birmingham Jail, MLK accurately identified this type of soft-tongued racist as even more of a problem than the klansman. It was a lynching. Bet he thought Emmett Till should have just been quiet...

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I’ve been debating people online for long enough that there aren’t many things that annoy me anymore. But one of them is the casual appropriation of black suffering.

Oh, a black person died? Why not call it a lynching, regardless of context or intent or before we even know the facts of the case? Why not compare it to Emmett Till’s murder, one of the most horrific racist murders we have a record of (and in their case, usually the only racist murder they’re historically literate enough to know about)?

Idiots.

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Steve QJ:

“Bet he thought Emmett Till should have just been quiet...”

I don't usually speak in such absolutist terms, but if you think this case is in any way comparable to the murder of Emmett Till, you're an idiot. It's not even worth trying to reason with somebody who would say something this historically ignorant.

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T:

If you read, I didn't compare them much, but to say both were lynchings, which they were. I would also own the unmade implication that both young men were killed more for their perceived threat to white comfort & social order than any danger.

But then, I separately went on to insult you by pointing out that you seem like the type of Comfortable Negro MLK wrote of in LFBJ, who would've found something similarly meely-mouthed & white-minded to say about Emmett Till's lynching, as the Stepin you Fetched in your article. Because that's what the evidence shows. (I'm fine with you calling me an idiot, btw. If you've read any of my few essays here, one is titled Fuq Civility. The proof for or against the names is the evidence, the writing. You seem like a Comfortable Negro because of the words you wrote. I'll consider your claim of my idiocy on the same ground.)

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Steve QJ:

“If you read, I didn't compare them much, but to say both were lynchings, which they were.”

No. They weren't. Neely's death was a tragic accident that wasn't motivated by hate. A lynching is the opposite of that in pretty much every way except the dead body at the end. And Emmett Till’s murder, in particular,

This "lynching" took place on a NYC subway, hardly a hotbed of whiteness and privilege. And plenty of non-white people also felt "discomfort" at the mentally ill man who was shouting threats at them. One of whom helps to restrain him.

Neely's death was a tragedy. I say that right there in the article. More than once in fact. But if preventing it happening to somebody else (regardless of their skin tone) is more important to you than the opportunity to flex your moral outrage, you're going to have to think seriously about why it happened. You don't have to be civil (though it helps). Just halfway intelligent.

Lastly, I don't know what a "comfortable Negro" is. Nor do you. It's just a stupid thing to say about somebody you know nothing about because they're black and didn't validate your unexamined feelings. A way to put a black person who threatens your worldview in a box in exactly the same way that good old-fashioned racists do.

You think that chip on your shoulder is a personality, or maybe an act of resistance and authenticity. It's not. It's a frankly rather boring cliche.

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T:

how droll. as i said, read MLK's letter from a birmingham jail, and you'll have an idea of the type of person i mean when i say "comfortable negro". it's a mindset reflected well in your distinctions-without-difference "analysis" of the Neely lynching. you seem to suggest that if it doesn't happen somewhere and isn't solely participated in a very stereotypical way, it can't be the lynching it was. a lynching is the murder of a black man in service of white supremacy. see the focus on the victim and the systemic aspect? if you think about the throat and motive served, rather than the colors of the hands and the particular killing field, you'll do better in pattern recognition.

hell, black men held down Fannie Lou Hamer as police beat her, but that doesn't make the violence less racist.

your take on this makes white folk, especially moderates, quite comfortable in watching yet another black man die, and not having to do anything but offer thoughts and prayers, and maybe throw a little money for social workers at it in the next budget. i know this because i've worked in government, specifically nyc city government policy, for about a decade. i'm mad because i'm aware.

and i had assumed you lived in nyc, but if you don't understand that the subways absolutely are controlled and policed as white spaces (which is why we settle so many police cases with black and brown folk, and have to so often revisit policing policies there), you're as uninformed as you are smug.

anyway, i have self-imposed a two volley limit for comfortable negro talk (btw, i'm also one, but i try to push against the privilege rather than lean in). last word, if any, is all you..

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Steve QJ:

“how droll. as i said, read MLK's letter from a birmingham jail”

How cute. Do you seriously think I haven't already read it?! I write about race professionally for God's sake.

Just for starters, King spoke eloquently and rationally because he had a point and principles and believed in the value in expressing them. People he disagreed with, even very strongly, weren't enemies or targets for name-calling. And because I also believe in what I'm saying, I don't impose a limit on how long I'll try to communicate it. Even to people who I find extremely unreasonable. If you want to preach about the lessons that can be learned from MLK, start there.

A lynching is an act of hatred. Or, at the very least, an act of overt racism. You might split hairs that the men who lynched runaway slaves didn't hate them personally (this would be a distinction without a difference in my opinion), but it is not the same thing, not even close, as the accidental death of a mentally unwell man who happened to be black.

I’ve been on the subway in New York hundreds of times. I lived there for a while. I have no idea what you mean by “controlled and policed as white spaces.” Again, I suspect neither do you. But my take on this is that nobody, black or otherwise, should die on the floor of a subway car because they're mentally ill. You could take my article, strip out all reference to the colour of Neely's skin, and it would make exactly the same points.

We need serious, productive conversation about mental health. We need to acknowledge that it isn't unreasonable to be afraid when a man starts behaving erratically in public. We need to acknowledge that it's not shocking that when people are afraid, the potential for tragic consequences increases.

None of this is shocking or controversial.

So if your argument is that it's "white supremacy" to want to live in a society where dangerous, schizophrenic men don't roam the streets or threaten innocent civilians, you should think very seriously about the implicit statement you're making about black people. Same if you're arguing that only a white person would be uncomfortable in that situation.

It's wild how you people who cry "white supremacy" at the drop of a hat don't realise what you're not-so-subtly implying about black people.

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I’ve pointed out several times that people like T, who so gleefully rage against systemic racism and “white supremacy,” are also the first to attack people in racial terms. 

Especially people of colour.

Multiracial whites, Uncle Toms, “foot soldiers for white supremacy,” the political right didn’t invent these terms, the identitarians did. 

Because identity politics isn’t about justice, it’s not about equality, it’s certainly not about anything that Martin Luther King stood for. It’s about tribalism in its stupidest, laziest, most bigoted form. Tribalism exactly as intellectually and morally bankrupt as the good old-fashioned racists.

It’s a tragic irony that people who think this way are labelled “progressives.” Because progress, whether for women or the LGBT community or black people, can only come through outgrowing this childish, primitive nonsense.