Truly brilliant.
Okay. So Charles Blow of the New York Times visited a Tea Party rally and called it a “minstrel show”. One of the speakers in question was Alonzo Rachel who categorically does not deserve to be called a “minstrel”. Many including Friedersdorf criticized how Blow misrepresented the Tea Party rally. A few people disagreed specifically with Friedersforf. And now Friedersdorf replies to those who argue against his critique of Charles Blow.
It is an exceptional piece. Not so much for what he says – namely that his criticisms of the New York Times piece by Charles Blow were on second and third examination correct – but for how he says it. He read carefully the writers who disagreed with him. He made the effort to understand their arguments. He looked for points of agreement. And then he respectfully and politely explained why he disagrees. So far as I can tell he does not make any snarky or derogatory comments about these writers who took issue with his earlier piece. In fact although he comes down hard on the piece by Charles Blow never does he appear to insult the man himself.
Among other things he went to the trouble of attempting to track down and talk with some of the people who spoke at the Tea Party rally.
After reviewing all this video, there may be minor disagreements or differing interpretations about a single speaker, and especially the complicated Ms. Boyne, but on the whole, I think it is accurate to conclude that my initial complaints about Mr. Blow’s column were well-founded, and the assumption that all or even most minority speakers at this Tea Party rally felt a need to elaborately signal their loyalty in order to be accepted is wrong. In their posts on this subject, my interlocutors suggested, in ways that sometimes puzzled me, that I am averse to acknowledging aspects of movement conservatism’s history that are racially creepy. That isn’t the case. I understand the historical and cultural reasons that many blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities are suspicious of this largely white populist movement.
But understanding the suspicion and where it comes from doesn’t mean refraining from defending the Tea Partiers, and especially specific gatherings of a some small percentage of Tea Partiers, when they’re attacked unfairly. In this instance, the defense happens to involve disproving some allegations about a black man, a Latina woman and a Vietnamese man that were themselves grounded in racial prejudgment, and corrosive to the ability of these people to be judged as autonomous individuals rather than stereotyped due to the color of their skin. Having said that, I think this has been a productive conversation, I hope I’ve represented the insights and arguments of everyone in a fair way, and I hope that if there are objections or disagreements that remain, folks will keep it going now that we’ve got actual footage to discuss rather than a misleading, reductive paragraph in a newspaper column.
Would that my own writings exhibit this level of quality.
