I've been refraining a bit to let passions--maybe--die down a bit, but maybe I've got something good to say here. First thing is that I really don't like the term "assassination", but prefer "murder" to describe this sort of thing, because "assassination" can lend an air of respectability to a crime that left a woman a widow, their children fatherless, and all in the name of a perverse sort of politics.
Murder it is. Regarding the claim that a hot temperature of rhetoric led to this, maybe, but we might be a little more specific. The habit I can think of that makes things the worst--the one that inflames passions--is generally the habit of making false allegations. They are often close to true, but in reality, they are false.
A good example is the claim that Kirk said that black women did not have the brain power to be taken seriously. Now I am not enough of a fan of Kirk's work to comment on his whole life's statements on this (and on many issues he seems to have changed his mind), but I am smart enough to listen to what he said in that video, which was that some specific black women did not have the brain power to be taken seriously.
We might say that Kirk ought to have considered the fact that some of these women have Ivy League degrees, whatever their affirmative action status, but in context, his actual statement is nowhere near as inflammatory as many, including supposed fact checkers, claim. It is the difference between the Aristotelian categories of "some" and "all".
And so how might we respond to this tragedy? I would dare say by choosing our words carefully, and by pointing out the problem when peoples' words and deeds are twisted to something they never meant.
No comments:
Post a Comment