wanye

On Noah Smith’s podcast he’s talking with Matthew Yglesias about how conservatives “lost their shit” over the, “if I had a son he would look like Trayvon” line.

Noah says he doesn’t get it. Why did they care about that line? Matt responds coyly (paraphrasing), “I mean, it’s unproductive to call people names, but…”

And then they both agree that it’s just because they’re racist. 

Noah doubles down (paraphrasing, again): “ok sure, they’re racist, but why this one line? I don’t get it.”

I don’t think this is a particularly difficult case!

It’s not that obscure: the belief is that Trayvon was not a great kid and was probably up to no good when he was killed and white people do not as a general rule immediately identify with shitty white people purely on racial grounds. For most white folks it’s very strange to jump straight to, “that could have been my kid” when some shithead teenager gets himself killed in a pointless fight.

All you have to grant is that conservatives mostly believe Trayvon to be the architect of his own demise and then the rest follows quite easily from there.

Crucially, you do not have to personally subscribe to this understanding of the facts in order to comprehend the controversy about the line.

It’s just kind of a weird thing to say, something that indicated to a lot of people that the president of the United States was not going to be capable of objectively evaluating the facts of the case, because of his own racial priors.

Like, maybe you actually do have a shithead for a teenager who is getting himself into a lot of trouble and so maybe you *would* actually think, “if I had a son he would look like that kid,” but it’s not something you’d want to say publicly, because it would be kind of an embarrassing admission about your shithead kid.

Yes. In order for Obama’s comments to really make sense, you have to assume that Trayvon was attacked just for being black and that this is a thing that could happen to just anybody for any reason, including the president’s hypothetical son.

But Obama was in no position to make that claim and it was irresponsible of him to do so from the office he held. He rushed to judgement. It was impetuous and reckless.