Because Richard Cohen recognizes that hoodies are a “uniform we all recognize,” which is apparently the uniform of The Thugs™, he is a racist. He says so himself. I certainly won’t argue with that.
This impressive piece of racist apologia from The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen is cut from the same cloth as John Derbyshire and many other white men before him who believed that they were the first person to come up with these ideas. That they’ve got it all figured out.
The truth is men have employed the same rationalizations to excuse their own prejudices for decades. More recently former Heritage Foundation fellow Jason Richwine used similar arguments, false intuition, and junk science to justify his support for eugenics and the idea that we shouldn’t pass comprehensive immigration reform because Latinos are genetically inferior.
But getting back to Cohen being an admitted racist — he even went on to say that, while the death of Trayvon Martin is tragic, Zimmerman wasn’t necessarily wrong for suspecting him. He was black after all. Wearing the “uniform we all recognize.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy — the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason.
Of course. It’s understandable. He was black.
If you still aren’t convinced that Richard Cohen is a racist even though he admitted it himself in plain English, he also employed reverse racism and referred to the president of the United States as “Barry.”
At one time, I thought Barack Obama would bring the problem into the open and remove the racist stigma. Instead, he perpetuated it. In his acclaimed Philadelphia speech on race, he cited his grandmother as “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street.”
How about the former Barry Obama? When he was a Columbia University student living on the lip of then-dangerous Harlem, did he never have the same fear?
Unless it is to apologize or reconcile how racist this country still is, white columnists need to shut the entire fuck up. You aren’t helping. You’re hurting America.
I’m looking forward to observing which bloggers and columnists leap to Cohen’s defense by offering up an impassioned defense of subjective reality. And by that I mean I’m preparing to remove my eyeballs with a spoon.