The racial situation is getting so charged that even intelligent people are failing to find an adequate tone. The usually brilliant Ta-Nehisi Coates has come out with the following disturbing slip of the tongue:

For activists and protesters radicalized by the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, this weekend’s killing may seem to pose a great obstacle. In fact, it merely points to the monumental task in front of them. Garner’s death, particularly, seemed to offer some hope.

I love Coates’s journalism but I can’t make myself go on reading. (I know he didn’t mean it the way it sounds but it still came out like this, and it sounds absolutely horrible.)

And then there are individuals who are trying to use tragedy to promote their writing careers by publishing screeds like the following one:

You are not going to stop. We understand that. Your inability to share and your fear of retribution goads you to try even harder to solidify your power. Making us, from America to Australia to West Papua, dependent upon you for food, (terminator seeds, anyone?) water (a commodity?), and a place to be, (What? You say you ‘control’ this land? But I live here!) Pushing your doctrine-driven education, not for the wonder of knowledge but to corral us into a self-defeating way of life that serves only you. Fomenting fear and hatred and violence because it pays so well. (And is so effectively distracting.)

I believe that it was an enormous mistake to attach the murder of Michael Brown to the very silly narrative of bad, mean, “militarized” police forces. Wafer wasn’t police, Zimmerman wasn’t police, and there are many other killers who weren’t police. This isn’t about police or anybody’s unresolved Daddy issues. This is about racism.

Now a murderer goes and kills two police officers because we were all collectively so freaked out about what was actually going on that we substituted what was happening with an extraneous narrative. Yes, the murderer would have killed no matter what anybody else did. Still, the officers are dead and we are all now engaged in a debate of how everybody feels about police, which ultimately is about nothing other than the degree of everybody’s psychological health. 

Now everybody can publicly indulge in the delightful exhibition of their psychological wounds. “Police can do no wrong” and “police are all evil” are not opposing positions. They are actually exactly the same and stem from a single root. What people who are making both statements (or any variation thereof) are actually saying is, “My father complex is so problematic that it makes me want to explode from the inside!” 

Trayvon Martin is dead. Michael Brown is dead. Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu are now also dead. But the esteemed public is still in the grip of its father complex and can talk of nothing else.