But speaking of ignorance, perhaps this Keith dolt can point to the definitive, peer-reviewed paper that proves that a distinct entity promoted as “HIV” exists, and then point to the definitive, peer-reviewed paper that proves that it, and it along causes “AIDS.” Certainly a hot-shot highly informed dolt like Keith can educate the rest of us with those simple references. Yeah . . . right.

Nobody is given a “pass” out of rationality . . . except religious believers and conservatives, of course.

The problem with white supremacists is not that they believe plausible but false things. It is that they believe things that no rational person should, and no decent person would. They are so obviously wrong in the most important parts of what they believe that their persistence in those beliefs can only be attributed to, literally, irrational animus.

No such criticisms attach to Wright. His claims about AIDS are false but they do not have to be explained by irrational animus. In the face of the undisputed historical legacy of white experimentation on, and manipulation of diseases in, blacks in America, they are perfectly plausible (though false), and, given that they can only be disproven by technical arguments largely wielded by the same kinds of people who were unquestionably guilty of abusing and manipulating blacks in the past, they are hard to overcome in a skeptical audience. That still does not mean they are correct, but they are nothing like Holocaust denial or anti-Semitic libels.

You persist in evaluating these various arguments – by Wright, or by Nazis, or by anti-Semites – with no reference at all to their factual basis or their historical context. I would think those would be the only bases on which it would be possible to evaluate them. I can only conclude that, for you, argument and belief does not depend upon fact or inference – what I don’t understand is why you think that makes you superior to Wright as a critical thinker. It seems obvious to me it does not.

America existed long before the United States of America, or the US government.

Regarding the federal role in abolition and the civil rights movement, there was one, but yours is a bizarrely strained version of it. The federal government fought to preserve the union – after delaying action on slavery as long as it could do so, and after Lincoln’s explicit statement that he would keep slavery to save the union if necessary. (Recall also his First Inaugural address, in which he explicitly endorsed a Constitutional amendment prohibiting the abolition of slavery ever afterward, and the fact that his Emancipation Proclamation explicitly exempted the Northern slave-holding states and counties that did not secede – in which legal slavery persisted after the Civil War.) The Supreme Court of the US was responsible for all the pro-slavery decisions that preceded the civil war, and the pro-segregation decisions the followed it until finally reversing itself in 1954. The National Guard troops that opened Southern schoolhouses under federal orders were the same troops that had been keeping them closed under state orders – and I suspect it hardly matters to the victims which badge the oppressor wears. The FBI that helped block the Klan during the Civil Rights Movement is the same FBI that bugged Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms, taped him having sex, and then sent the tapes to his wife with a note suggesting that King should commit suicide.

Aside from any few particular examples, the bare fact is that slavery and Jim Crow were legal and upheld by the Constitution for almost 200 years, and that systematic segregation and oppression continued long after the few landmark Court rulings of the Civil Rights movement. Anti-black discrimination was not just the isolated product of individuals acting without any guidance or approval – it was, literally, the law of the land throughout the largest part of the country’s history. That law was imposed by legislatures and enforced by courts and police, generation after generation. And it created a lasting legacy of underclass status, social division, and simultaneously triumphal and self-justifying white arrogance that marks almost every aspect of society today. Discrimination, and official oppression, on the basis of race and sex are the defining characteristics of American society, and they were never accidental or contingent – they were both written into the Constitution itself (as interpreted by white men), and enforced by law and social practice for centuries.

As you’ll note on re-reading the text, I said repeatedly Wright’s beliefs regarding AIDS were false. But they are not worthy of criticism if they are rationally justifiable as beliefs (we all harbor false beliefs of various kinds, but some are groundless, some are based on invalid grounds, and some are rational).

Your statements above are groundless, contradict well-known facts, have no support among knowledgeable researchers, and appear to be the product of some sort of racist grudge. The same is true of Holocaust denial. Those are reasons for rejecting those beliefs.

None of that is true of Wright’s beliefs about AIDS. I explained that in detail. He is wrong about them, but they are not far-fetched – only false. There is good evidence disproving them, but it is technical, and it is the product of the same system that is responsible for so many similar abuses in the past. It would be understandable that that evidence would be discounted – and if it is, Wright’s beliefs become all too rational, grounded on all too real historical evidence. It is not his fault that that is true, and it seems to me hard to blame him for not overcoming the suspicions that history engenders. It is not his – or any other black person’s – responsibility to convince themselves that the people who enslaved and abused them in the past will not do so again – particularly in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.

Wright isn’t ignorant. How many times has his educated creds been cited? Wright exploits the paranoia of others. He used his position of authority to disseminate fiction as fact. No amount of equivocating about “well, given the awful history … let me mix some facts with opinion here” excuses it. The analogy is apt, since there are white supremacist [ostensible] “churches” who promulgate anti-Semitic as well as anti-Black lines. What should people think of authors that tried to give a leader of one of those “churches” as pass based on the awful things that leader might have seen?

As B Moe points out… why only 400 years of “American” chattel slavery? Blacks weren’t the first slaves in the New World (the Irish were) and certainly they weren’t the only slaves. My family was sold out of a debtors prison and brought to the New World in 1697, then sold to work on a Virginia plantation.

Makes me much more a member of the American slave experience than Obama can ever claim.

…beside the 400-year history of chattel slavery that America openly and deliberately imposed on its black citizens.

Since the US has only been a country for a bit over 200 years, statements like this make me wonder what exactly you mean by America in the first place.