While the American political commentariat obsesses over whether or not this means that "every Trump voter is racist," this distinction is unimportant.
The trouble in assuming that racists make distinctions between the black people they can tolerate and those they won't is that you position yourself as the "better black" with a better chance of being liked.
Didn't the Turks murder enough Armenians to qualify them for a capital H? I wrote a long memorandum to my then editor, Simon Kelner, explaining that it was racist to make a distinction between two genocides; we could not base our definition on the numerical difference between 1,500,000 and 6,000,000.
But, he said, it also has a reputation as a haven for racists, an unfortunate distinction generated by white-supremacist groups that congregate in northern Idaho and exacerbated by the fact that it is one of the least ethnically diverse states in the nation.
Certainly, the idea that we have a common ancestor from Africa will induce nosebleeds in racists who have made such distinctions the basis for discrimination.
Instead, it looks like a game so paralysed by anxiety that it is unable to make the distinction between being racist and talking about racism – and unwilling to pay anyone who is attentive to that difference.
Wallace claimed that he was not a racist, he was a segregationist, a distinction without a difference.
But yesterday Mr. Bernardi and Shai Goldstein, director of the New Jersey office of the Anti-Defamation League, said the county did not have any particular distinction as a home for racist groups.
In discussing the Paula Deen situation, for example, many black ministers and scholars drew the distinction between a private person holding racist beliefs and a public figure who injects those beliefs into institutional power.
The comparison to Nazi marches and racist hate speech fails to acknowledge a critical distinction — speaking out in favor of criminal activity versus the carrying out of criminal acts.
