How to Regard This Week’s Race Conflicts

William Saletan has written a Slate article There Is a War Over Race in America in which he brilliantly redraws the dividing line:

This is the central thing to understand about what happened in Dallas: Black people who target whites are fundamentally allied with white people who target blacks. They’re on the same team: the race war team.

Today’s Op-Eds in the NYT are full of writings about “black” and “white”, but Saletan is saying that the divide is between violent people and peaceful people.

I find this a much more useful viewpoint. An entomologist might classify insects by the number of legs they have, but a much more practical distinction is whether they bite or not.