Conservative icon and ardent Trump supporter Ann Coulter oozes self-satisfaction in a Breitbart editorial in which she tosses the history of race in America aside in favor of cold, hard logic and asserts that politics essentially exists in an ahistorical vacuum.
Granted, perhaps it should -- but Coulter isn't a utopian idealist, she's an opportunist who finds joy in equating what Donald Trump said about the inability of a "Mexican" judge to preside over his case fairly with the centuries of white judges and juries being patently and proudly incapable of treating non-white litigants as human beings.
In other words, there are false equivalences, and then there is this:
Has anyone ever complained about the ethnicity of white judges or white juries? I’ve done some research and it turns out … THAT’S ALL WE’VE HEARD FOR THE PAST 40 YEARS.
The New York Times alone has published hundreds of articles, editorials, op-eds, movie reviews, sports articles and crossword puzzles darkly invoking “white judges” and “all-white” juries, as if that is ipso facto proof of racist justice.
Two weeks ago — that’s not an error; I didn’t mean to type “decades” and it came out “weeks” — the Times published an op-ed by a federal appeals judge stating: “All-white juries risk undermining the perception of justice in minority communities, even if a mixed-race jury would have reached the same verdict or imposed the same sentence.”
In other words, even when provably not unfair, white jurors create the “perception” of unfairness solely by virtue of the color of their skin.
It's almost as if she deliberately ignores the fact that structural racism exists -- that non-whites were once 3/5th of a person, that Jim Crow and segregation were once the laws of the land, etc. Because it's almost as if she wants her aggrieved white readers to believe that because they, like Trump, never owned slaves, it's impossible for them to be actual racists -- that they are, in fact, anti-racists:
On one hand, it’s vital that we have more women and Latinos on the courts because white men can’t be trusted to be fair. But to suggest that women and Latinos could ever be unfair in the way that white men can, well, that’s “racist.”
This logic only holds when history is conveniently -- and deliberately -- excluded from the conversation.
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