re: If you are OK/Celebrating Alex Jones being banned but had no issues with Sarah Jeong

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And this is what the conservative critiques of Jeong — even the good-faith ones, like Sullivan’s and French’s — miss entirely. When you talk about race and identity, the context in which you’re operating is absolutely inescapable. The sentence “white people run America” may use most of the same words as “Jews run America,” but the former is mostly true while the latter is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Historical structures of oppression, along race and other identity lines, shape the way Americans see the world deeply and profoundly. Everything that’s said about minority groups is interpreted through the weight of these expectations. One study found that children start thinking in racist terms when they’re about 8 years old. It’s absurd to pretend, given centuries of racialized oppression, that the phrases “white people” and “black people” can be swapped in a sentence without profoundly changing the meaning.

This is indicative of a broader failing in the conservative movement.

The weight of history is typically minimized, with the success or failure of minority groups being seen in colorblind, individualized terms. If black people aren’t as wealthy as whites, it’s not the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining; it’s because they’re lazy, or addicted to welfare, or (as Sullivan has posited) simply genetically less likely to be intelligent. There has to be some explanation other than the fact that everything in our society is structured around a longstanding racial caste system, one that persists even after the laws have been made on-face colorblind.

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