TaNehisi Coates: Racism vs. the Race Card

The conservative movement doesn’t understand anti-racism as a value, only as a rhetorical pose. This is how you end up tarring the oldest integrationist group in the country (the NAACP) as racist. The slur has no real moral content to them. It’s all a game of who can embarrass who. If you don’t think racism is an actual force in the country, then you can only understand it’s invocation as a tactic.

This is a very old way of you thinking. It’s what you get out of watching Buckley’s bumbling response to Baldwin—he neither regards Baldwin with any seriousness, nor the issue with any real concern. It’s a game to him. He is effectively a homer for team red. Nothing else matters.

That tradition of viewing racism, not as an actual thing of import, but merely as rhetoric continues today. To abandon that tradition, I suspect, would be cause for an existential crisis.

If nothing else, go watch the debate between Baldwin and Buckley he links/cites in this article. It actually made my opinion of Buckley go down, because he so clearly mistakes rhetorical flourish for solid argumentation.