"Putin, having been shaped by a Cold War-era K.G.B. that specialized in manipulating U.S. racial tensions, was almost certainly aware ..."

"... that a perception that [Brittney] Griner might receive insufficient attention could be used to his advantage. The activism that resulted from that perception no doubt helped push the Biden Administration to make a deal rather than to risk repeating the miscalculations of the Reagan Administration. Still, the Griner affair may yet reiterate a crucial lesson of December, 1983—that inequality, or even the appearance of inequality, is not only a liability at home but an impediment in foreign affairs. The irony is that Putin, in the most cynical way possible, has demonstrated that Black lives really do matter, by highlighting just how much you can achieve by placing one in jeopardy."

Writes Jelani Cobb in "Brittney Griner and the Role of Race in Diplomacy/Griner’s release recalls the lessons of the effort to free Robert Goodman, an African American Navy navigator, from Syria" (The New Yorker).

"Liberals bully people who are Trump supporters!" — says Kanye West (in an interview with David Letterman).

The Daily Beast reports.

In the midst of a somewhat confusing argument about his “fear” as a man during the #MeToo movement, Kanye says, “This is like my thing with Trump—we don’t have to feel the same way, but we have the right to feel what we feel.” When he wears his “Make America Great Again” hat, he says it’s “not about politics” but rather an attempt to break the stigma around showing support for Trump....

“So if I see a person that I admire talking about Donald Trump can think whatever he does,” [Letterman] says, “I wonder if those thoughts, indirectly, aren’t hurting people who are already being hurt.”...

[Kanye] expresses sympathy for Trump voters who are “treated like enemies of America because that’s what they felt.”...

“Have you ever been beat up in your high school for wearing the wrong hat?” [says Kanye]. Asked who is doing the bulk of the bullying in America right now, he replies, “Liberals bully people who are Trump supporters!”

I found that story because I could see something people were googling today was sending traffic to an old post of mine ("We can infer that Kanye West, Russell Simmons, and Sean Combs declined to talk to the NYT about Donald Trump" (August 2017)).

ADDED: Speaking of old articles about Trump and rappers, I'm reading the July 2015 New Yorker article "Donald Trump Is a Rapper" (by Jelani Cobb):

Donald Trump was gifted with a surname that already sounds like a rapper’s nom de microphone.... Trump’s combativeness and overt egomania... is precisely the behavior we expect—nay, demand—from hip-hop artists....

Hip-hop has been a leading force in what might be called the un-ironic American self-homage.... [Trump's] enduring presence as a figure of public interest is directly tied to the way he offers an aspirational identity that appeals, in particular, to working-class men....

None of this will get him elected.... [M]ostly Trump is simply played out. Preening egotism has a limited shelf life, even for rappers. This is his fraction of a moment of possibility in a campaign that, like a new single buoyed by hype and shock value, grabs the public when it’s released, then falls completely off the charts.

What does Black Lives Matter think about gun control?

In "After Dallas, the Future of Black Lives Matter," in The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb interviewing Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, asks about guns: "Does Black Lives Matter have a position on that? Is that something that you all have thought about in the wake of those incidents?"

Garza says:

When it comes to gun control, I think it’s too simplistic of a conversation. Both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had guns on them, which is part of their Second Amendment right. It is a part of a culture that is largely protected by special-interest groups like the N.R.A., but the right to bear arms, it seems, only exists for white people. When black people have arms, legally, they can still also be killed at the hands of the police. That’s what we saw this past week.

At the same time, because it’s a question of police and vigilante violence is so prevalent at this particular moment in this country, it feels asinine to be calling for gun control when black people, in particular, are on the losing end of that conversation, so there’s that. But then there’s the reality that, in this country, we have more guns than people, and we put guns into the hands of more people than any other country on the planet, and so that dynamic needs to be shifted. I’ll be honest with you, I really struggle with the conversation around gun control.

It’s clear to me that this person who committed these acts was not well. And also was experiencing a level of emotional trauma, like the rest of this country, in particular like the rest of black people in this country, who watched two executions on television, so his stated motive was, “I’m really upset by what I’m seeing where police are killing black people.”

At that point, Cobb sees reason to remind Garza that most people say "they want better policing" and not "that they want to actually kill the police." Garza answers:

I don’t disagree, but the point that I’m trying to make is, I think it’s an error to look at the state of why this country is so violent and not understand the complexities that lie underneath the violence. The violence that was caused by that lone gunperson in Dallas was very complex. It wasn’t about him being an adherent to black-power ideologies, as the media tried to frame it. He may have been pro-black, but he was also probably a lot of other things, and similarly when we look at the underlying causes for police violence, it’s also not black-and-white. It’s not always only about racism, or it’s not always about “police just hate black people.”

By the way, when the Dallas shootings took place, there were many people in the protesting crowd who were exercising their right under Texas law to carry firearms openly:

The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown... said the event had attracted “20 or 30 people” who “showed up with AR-15 rifles slung across their shoulder... They were wearing gas masks... They were wearing bulletproof vests and camo fatigues, for effect, for whatever reason.”

When the shooting started, “they began to run,” he said. And because they ran in the middle of the shooting, he said, the police on the scene viewed them as suspects. “Someone is shooting at you from a perched position, and people are running with AR-15s and camo gear and gas masks and bulletproof vests, they are suspects, until we eliminate that.”...

"Unlike the Washington journalists, who all but wore cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s..."

"... Carr never needed people to think that he was the smartest guy in the room. He could be self-deprecatingly funny."

From "Postscript: David Carr (1956-2015)," by Jelani Cobb (in The New Yorker).

... Washington journalists, who all but wore cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s...

Good lord! I'd love to know the details of the I.Q.-pride that Cobb witnessed. Cobb's short piece mourns the fallen media critic David Carr, and we are not told about that larger context within which Carr was an outlier. I want to hear what underlies that snarky cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s image. It's hard even to understand. If there were cufflinks inscribed with I.Q.s, there would be no point in displaying neediness about being regarded as the smartest guy in the room. We could check your cufflinks and see a number that everyone in a room with such cufflinks would regard as a statement of the actual fact.

I don't live and move amongst the journalists of Washington. I've been embedded in academia here in The North for 30 years. If anyone displayed neediness about seeming to be the smartest guy — only guys, Jelani? — in the room around here, he'd be regarded — I think — as a little embarrassing and less intelligent than the rest, and someone behaving in the Carr manner would be far more likely to be suspected of being the most intelligent. Self-deprecation seems perfectly normal in my habitat.

So tell me, Mr. Cobb, how insufferably obnoxious are these Washington assholes?

I mean, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should honor the humble and brilliant media critic who has departed, but it is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished media criticism which he so nobly advanced.

ADDED: In the I.Q. cufflinks system, at what point on the I.Q. spectrum would it be wise to wear cufflinks displaying a lower I.Q. than your actual I.Q.? How much would people deviate from their actual, tested I.Q.s as they sought business, political, and social advantages? What would be the optimum I.Q. for getting along and getting ahead and how would it vary from Washington to NYC to Madison or wherever? I mean, let's say the best I.Q. for these purposes was found to be 120: How far below 120 could you be and still con people into believing you're a 120? How far above 120 could you go and still pull it off? This hypo is horribly complicated by our suspicions that I.Q. isn't a useful enough metric, but deal with it. In the hypo, people believe in the significance enough to wear I.Q. cufflinks. So the subjective judgments would have a very real effect even if the numbers were junk science.

"We like to think of the men and women whose struggle led to Brown v. Board of Education as democratic idealists..."

"... but their motivations were more complex: if the efforts to upend Jim Crow reflected idealism, it was a cynical idealism," writes Jelani Cobb in a New Yorker article titled "The Failure of Desegregation."

"The prevalence of specifically racial offenses shouldn’t blind us to a kind of bigotry jiu-jitsu that often follows in the wake of these incidents..."

"... in which the offenders quickly flip the script to portray themselves as the victims of intolerance toward their own intolerant remarks."

One of many New Yorkerish sentences in a New Yorker piece grappling with the way playing the race card backfires. And I mixed my metaphors knowingly and with intent to be annoying, because I don't think The New Yorker — famous for its "Block That Metaphor" squibs — noticed it mixed metaphors of eyesight, martial arts, boating, script-writing, and portraiture.

IN THE COMMENTS: Henry says:

I'm trying to figure out the point of the word "specifically."

That seems to imply the existence of "vaguely racial offenses" which by definition must be even more prevalent than the specific ones. The world is awash in the brickbats of hamhanded script-flippers.

My offhand theory would be that "specifically racial offenses" are incidents where the use of race is explicit or at least implicit and intended, to be contrasted with pervasive disparities that can be perceived or understood to have a racial aspect, like incarceration or poverty or inadequate education. It's exasperating to comb through the author's tangled prose, but here are a couple sentences than might support my theory:

[Melissa] Harris-Perry’s apology was striking precisely because we inhabit a hallucinatory moment in which the lines of power, inequality, and, yes, victimhood are blurred. Untouched is the higher standard for those confronting real grievances, the kinds rooted in systemic, empirical inequalities, not the imaginings of the angry entitled.

I love the use of "precisely." It serves a function similar to "specifically." And here we are, living within a hallucination full of blurred lines. I guess that first sentence means that if anyone says anything at all clear, like Harris-Perry's apology, it's striking. In a world of blurred hallucination, we're surprised to discern anything.

Now, what's going on in the next sentence? What is "untouched"? Harris-Perry apologized for her specific racial offense, but there are also the "real grievances," things that are more important, but harder to discern. The real grievances are the "systemic, empirical inequalities," but they're nonspecific, so thoroughly woven into everything that if you try to point them out, people will hold you to a "higher standard." Instead of talking about what really matters, we pay attention to the wrong victims, the upstart victims, like Mitt Romney, who's able easily to command our concern, because of the specificity of Harris-Perry's offense.

Okay, I think I untangled that, and I do see the author's point. His name is Jelani Cobb, and I think for whatever reason, he's decided it's brilliant to write like that, and The New Yorker is refraining from the tough work of word editing, for which it was once renowned.