Jamelle Bouie has a response to the Chait piece at Slate. It is worth reading because it offers an important corrective to Chait: there is an actual lived experience of racism that Chait does not address. The most poignant example is the feeling a 20-year-old black woman has when her younger brother rides his bike to the corner store and is tailed by a squad car. Regardless of the rhetorical foibles to which our conflation of race and political persuasion have committed us, race still matters at a visceral, experiential, and real level because it in fact still exists.
Bouie effectively reminds us that while it makes sense to remember that racism and conservatism are not coterminous, we must also remember that many conservative policies (such as voter ID laws), whether overtly racist or not, have a disproportionately negative impact on racial minorities, especially African Americans. In instances when a policy, conservative or otherwise, has a disproportionately negative impact on minorities, we should still get rid of the policy, whether it's origin was intentionally racist or not, and we should not be afraid to discuss the policy's racial impact, regardless of how the policy's supporters react. And this requires us to engage with, talk about, and act on the lived experience of black Americans.
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