Trevor Noah: What’s the “Middle” Between White Supremacy and Equality for All?

Trevor Noah: What’s the “Middle” Between White Supremacy and Equality for All?

Son of Baldwin 
2016-12-07

Son of Baldwin (Robert Jones, Jr)


[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Trevor Noah dressed in a suit, seen from the chest up, smiling.]

I respect Trevor Noah.

I respect the position he finds himself in and his attempts at trying to find common ground. It’s hard when your loyalties are split and so you have a particular, if peculiar, idea of where the “middle” is.

What I’ll need Noah to explain to me is this: What is the middle between white supremacy and equality for all? And does whatever that middle is benefit white supremacy or equality?

One of the things I dislike about Noah’s perspective is how it misrepresents false equivalence as balance.

I know that when it comes to racial matters, some people feel that they can “see it from both sides” and, therefore, “know the answer is in the middle.” If black people in the United States were in power equal to that of white people; if the laws and institutions and education and media dipped in favor of black people as much as it does white people, then there might be an actually middle to arrive at.

But you cannot start from a place where the scales are tipped in favor of one group and treat it as though the scale is level. Your answer will always be incorrect when your starting equation has one of the variables wrong…

Read the entire article here.

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