1. Have you ever read something, and thought to yourself, “That can’t be right?” The first time I read the opening of this @AdamSerwer essay, that was my reaction: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
@AdamSerwer 2. White supremacists slaughtered more than 100 black men in 1873, in Colfax. Seventy-two men were indicted. But it was this, from a justice on the Supreme Court, that stopped me cold:
@AdamSerwer 3. The government, he wrote, had failed to prove that the accused had “committed the acts complained of with a design to deprive the injured persons of their rights on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
@AdamSerwer 4. “Perhaps such a design may be inferred,” he went on, “from the allegation that the persons injured were of the African race….but it ought not to have been left to inference.” In plan English: Sure, everyone they killed was black, but can you prove it was racism?
@AdamSerwer 5. This is the arid logic of abstract rights, in which theoretical liberties float free of lived realities. @AdamSerwer lays it out more brilliantly than I ever could. Go read it. I promise, you won’t regret it: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
