I don’t normally do a weekend newsletter, but I want to talk about Ezra Klein.
**This discussion is an excerpt from my Friday Weekly Roundup Live. I had an extended conversation about Klein that I think is worth sharing separately.****
I have never been a fan. I have always thought he was given too much intellectual credibility, treated as if he were a deep thinker when he is not. His analysis has always struck me as thin, missing the depth required to understand the complexities of the topics he covers.
The first time I really paid attention to him, he was talking about women in the workplace. I do not remember the exact issue, but I remember clearly that he did not understand intersectionality at all. He did not see how race, gender, and age interact. If you think of intersectionality as a prism that refracts light in many directions, his analysis was a flat mirror. It had no dimension, no depth, no color.
So I was not surprised when Ezra Klein recently wrote about the man who was assassinated while supposedly “practicing politics the right way.” I am not saying the man’s name because invoking it feels like saying “Candyman.” Say it three times and chaos shows up. What happened was terrible, but the framing, this idea of debating “the right way,” misses the point entirely.
Robert Jones, who wrote under the name Son of Baldwin, once said, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my human rights.” That quote came to mind reading Klein’s piece, and again while watching his conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Klein, in that discussion, engaged in what I would call intellectual dishonesty. When Coates talked about the historical roots of race, Klein brushed it off by saying, “That was a long time ago.” But George Floyd was not a long time ago. It was five years ago. Black people are still underemployed even when we have equal or greater education and experience than our white peers. None of this is ancient history. Referencing slavery and the historical structures of oppression is not about living in the past. It is about tracing the architecture of how we got here.
Klein’s dismissiveness flattens the conversation and turns racism into just another opinion to be debated. And racism is not an opinion. When you frame it that way, you open the door for people to debate my humanity, my intellect, and my right to exist as if those are abstract ideas rather than lived realities. That mindset takes us back to pre-emancipation thinking, when so-called intellectuals debated whether Black people were fully human, whether we felt pain, and whether we deserved rights.
Centuries ago, white scholars and physicians argued that enslaved Africans had higher pain tolerances than white servants, which justified brutal beatings. That belief persists. Only a few years ago, surveys showed that many doctors still believe Black people feel less pain than white patients. This is not ancient history. It is a direct throughline from those early “intellectual” justifications for inhumanity.
That is why Ezra Klein’s lack of depth is so revealing. He does not understand that the conversations he treats as abstract have centuries of real-world consequence. He has been elevated as an intellectual because he sounds thoughtful, but sounding thoughtful and being thoughtful are not the same.
He has been granted authority by a system that loves the illusion of reasoned debate. Yet he debates topics that are not up for debate. Saying that Black people are unintelligent or more prone to crime is not debate. It is propaganda. It is violence disguised as discourse.
During that conversation with Coates, Klein came across as willfully ignorant and enamored with his own intellect. He believes his own hype. He believes he is beyond reproach, that he exists above bias. But as one writer said, he “bemoans an America that never existed.” The America he imagines, the land of polite debate and meritocratic discourse, was only ever real for those who did not have to live in the real America.
And that brings us to the larger point. Race, as Coates says, is not the father of racism. Race is the child of racism. Race was created to justify an economic system of exploitation. Before that, people thought of themselves as European, Italian, English, or Irish. “White” was invented to unite them against Blackness and preserve the economic and political power of a small elite.
From the Southern planter class to today’s tech billionaires, that elite has always needed a racial hierarchy to maintain control. They built what Historian Edmund Morgan called a racial screen of contempt. This psychological barrier prevents poor and working-class white people from recognizing the wealthy as their true oppressors. Instead, they are taught to see Black people as their competition and to take comfort in being “above” someone else.
That dynamic is the real American dream: no matter how poor or excluded you are, you can still feel superior to someone Black. That is the inheritance whiteness offers.
The problem with Ezra Klein, the Bernie Bros, and a certain kind of white liberal is that they refuse to see this. They try to have purely economic conversations without reckoning with the racial screen of contempt that shapes every American exchange. Until we deal with that, we will never have an honest economic debate because race will always be the silent foundation underneath it.
As I said in my book Qualified, people will die to preserve whiteness. Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness shows how white Americans will forgo healthcare, refuse safety regulations, and even shorten their lives rather than relinquish the psychological comfort of racial superiority.
Ezra Klein and others like him keep missing that. They keep trying to analyze racism as if it is a disagreement among equals instead of a centuries-long campaign to define who counts as human. Racism is not an opinion. It is a system. And debating whether I am fully human is not a noble intellectual debate, and there's no right way to do it.
Some citations for you:
1 .https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination-fear-politics.html
2.
https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/2025/10/08/we-took-the-freedom-of-speech-away-trump-on-flag-burning-protection/86592573007/
