He wrote it after seeing "Twelve Years a Slave" and in part has convinced me to go see it.
But that is not why I am urging you to read 12 Years a Slave and the Obama Era. Perhaps his opening paragraph may help:
This last weekend, I finally saw 12 Years a Slave. It was the most powerful movie I’ve ever seen in my life, an event so gripping and terrifying that, when I went to bed ten hours later — it was a morning matinee — I lay awake for five hours turning it over in my mind before I could fall asleep. I understand it not merely as the greatest film about slavery ever made, as it has been widely hailed, but a film more broadly about race. Its sublimated themes, as I understand them, identify the core social and political fissures that define the American racial divide to this day. To identify 12 Years a Slave as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era.
That will give you a sense of the perceptiveness of the thought and the quality of the writing.
Part of his motivation was to read a column by Quin Hillyer, whom Chait makes clear he does not believe to be an overt racist - Hillyer worked against the candidacy of David Duke, for example. But he says of Hillyer
In the absence of a racial slur or an explicitly bigoted attack, no racial alarm bells sound in his brain.
And this seems to be an ongoing problem for many Conservatives.
Please keep reading.
The paragraph that immediately follows what I quoted above the fold provides something of a historic context:
The broad social structure of white supremacy is not a part of the working conservative definition of racism. Conservatives see racism as a series of discrete acts of overt oppression. After slavery had disappeared, but before legal segregation had, conservatives considered it preposterous to claim that blacks suffered any systematic disadvantage in American life. (For an lengthy but fascinating expression of the conservative view, watch William F. Buckley in 1965 sneering his way through a debate over race relations with James Baldwin.)
In fairness, over time Buckley became sensitive to some of the problems expressed by some more extreme conservatives, in which regard I call to your attention his noteworthy writings against the anti-Semitism of one of his own editors, Joseph Sobran, and of Patrick J. Buchanan. But even coming to that realization took Buckley far too long, and unfortunately other Conservatives neither followed him there nor extending their awareness to the words and actions that continued to bespeak a lack of racial understanding even if not outright deliberate racism.
Chait rightly notes the actions by some leading Conservatives to try to purge their ranks of outright racists, which should be acknowledged but since they also should be mandatory of those wishing to participate in serious publiic discourse probably do not require additional overt praise.
His penultimate paragraph immediately follows:
Instead, the racial battlegrounds of the Obama era have settled on a series of more ambiguous controversies. Conservatives have made endless jokes based on the strange premise that Obama is unable to express coherent thoughts unless reading from a teleprompter, defined health-care reform as “reparations,” imagined a Reagan-era program to subsidize telephone use for the indigent is actually “Obamaphones,” or complained when black entertainers or athletes socialize with the First Family. The accusations of racism that follow merely confirm to conservatives that black-on-white racism is a canard, that the balance of oppression has turned against them.
Those participating here are well-aware of the distorted thinking of some on the right that think there is now more anti-Christian and/or anti-White discrimination in this country, merely because we have a President who is black and has a Muslim-sounding name (even though he is a Christian). I often wonder if such claims of being on the receiving end of discrimination and prejudice are not merely psychological projection to avoid confronting what they really know about the discrimination and prejudice towards others that is so much a part of how they continue to operate?
Which gets us to Chait's concluding paragraph:
Conservatives can transport themselves for two hours into the hellish antebellum world of 12 Years a Slave and experience the same horror and grief that liberals feel. What they cannot do, almost uniformly, is walk out of the theater and detect the still-extant residue of that world all around them.
Cannot, or will not? I am not so sure. Multiple times in the prophetic writings of the Hebrew Bible we encounter words like these from Ezekial: "They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear" - but sometimes it is phrased as "cannot" rather than "do not."
For my own part, I can acknowledge that the way their thinking has been shaped, over generations to be sure, and certainly through their own lifetime, for many they truly are incapable of recognizing the still-extant residue of that world all around them as Chait puts it, and that is part of what is wrong in this country, because it should be obvious to any sentient creature willing to look.
Read Chait's piece. I do not always agree with what he offers, but he is always thoughtful, this time I believe powerfully so.