Description: The author of this op-ed calls out the practice of judging people’s politics by how well they align with their racial identities. The author makes some valid points, but without any self awareness, he commits a similar type of error by likening the behavior to a disease. In other words, in the author’s mind, the behavior is so wrong that it must be a sickness, i.e. something that only “othered” people or “insane” people do. This is not much different from people who were trying to categorize racism as a mental illness in the years following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, or people who once perceived LGBTQ+ people as mentally ill. I’ve discussed the weaponization of medical language at length here and here, but Imani Barbarin also does a concise takedown on X.

Source: The Guardian