More On Cohen’s Racial Profiling

So I come back after being mostly gone from the internets for a couple days, and see that a controversy that seems silly even for Malkin’s flying monkeys (you did see the “became a monster” bit, right?) actually getting some mainstream traction as well.  But I will let SEK deal with that more seriously.  In the meantime, Coates on Cohen is pure gold:

Richard Cohen concedes that this is a violation, but it is one he believes black people, for the good of their country, must learn to live with. Effectively he is arguing for a kind of racist public safety tax. The tax may, or may not, end with a frisking. More contact with the police, and people who want to be police, necessarily means more deadly tragedy. Thus Cohen is not simply calling for my son and I to bear the brunt of “violation,” he is calling for us to run a higher risk of death and serious injury at the hands of the state. Effectively he is calling for Sean Bell’s fianceé, Trayvon Martin’s parents, Amadou Diallo’s mother, Prince Jones’ daughter, the relatives of Kathryn Johnston to accept the deaths of their love ones as the price of doing business in America.

The unspoken premise here is chilling — the annihilation of the black individual.

The rare occasions when Cohen tries to write something substantive makes me appreciate the more typical times when he’s a definitively lazy hack with nothing to say.