Kennedy: Nobody’s buying it,…
Kennedy: Nobody’s buying it, and this is precisely why you should deal with arguments first.
Look, just to be clear, I think that there are plenty of racist creeps involved in immigration debates, but that Jason is not one of them. When I am arguing with them (contrary to Jason’s suggestion, I do argue with some of them) I don’t flinch at calling their position racist. That’s not a failure to “deal with arguments first;” it’s a characterization of the type of argument being mounted. Maybe a racist argument is cogent and maybe it’s not; but whatever it is somebody mounting one does have a responsibility to own up to the fact that that’s what she or he is doing.
However, I don’t think that that’s what Jason is doing, and whether anybody is “buying it” or not, I was not suggesting that it was. If you think saying “That’s mighty white of you” is necessarily intended as an insinuation of racism, you’re mistaken. (See, for example, here, here, or myself here, in contexts that clearly have nothing in particular to do with accusations of racism.)
If I wanted to say that his argument was racist, I would have said, “Your argument is racist,” or something to that effect.
Anticopyright.