Racism is complicated. When America's most brilliant thinkers set out to explain its nature in terms as clear as the English language allows, as Michael Eric Dyson did in his searing July 7 essay "Death in Black and White," even the relatively sophisticated readers of the New York Times didn't get it. Commenters didn't understand that Dyson wasn't criticizing every white person, but "white America" — shorthand for a dominant power structure that is fundamentally racist while (of course) not every white person is.
If anti-racist white people take writing as straightforward as Dyson's personally, if they take offense at his passion and so miss his message, is there any hope of "black America" and "white America" just getting along?
It was a hell of a week. Two more black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, were gunned down by the police under the usual incomprehensible circumstances — events the media, and thus the government, are paying attention to only because someone invented the smartphone. Then on Thursday, a 25-year-old sniper, a veteran of America's brutal war against Afghanistan, shot 12 police officers at a march in Dallas protesting the deaths in Minnesota and Louisiana. Five died.