The Democrats thought Brett Kavanaugh was a safe target. Accusing a white prepster named “Brett” would be a great way to achieve several goals: stopping him from changing the balance of SCOTUS in favor of conservatives, and showing solidarity with women and with #MeToo. Who on earth would identify with Kavanaugh except other white preppy guys on the right, and they weren’t going to vote for Democrats anyway, so no great loss.

Well, it turns out that some women are concerned about the men in their lives, too. False accusations can ruin nearly anyone (women included, although I’m not sure how many women consider that aspect).

However, another obvious group that might look at the Kavanaugh hearings and become concerned about what was happening to him is black men. If that sounds counter-intuitive to some people, it certainly doesn’t sound counter-intuitive to me. It occurred to me, while watching the proceedings, that black men might not take too kindly to this little exercise in Believing Women No Matter What.

After all, Clarence Thomas—the man whose position during confirmation for SCOTUS presented the closest analogy to what Brett Kavnaugh faced thirty years later—didn’t call his own hearings “a high-tech lynching” for nothing. Thomas was reminding the country of a terrible past in which black men were lynched not metaphorically but actually, and to whom unspeakable atrocities were committed, merely on the word of a white woman accusing them of rape or other more minor sexual advances. This is not ancient history, either. It is a history that the majority of Americans—and certainly virtually all black Americans—know about.

Why didn’t it occur to Democrats that their approach to Kavanaugh might bother black men as well as white ones? My theory is that Democrats now think so completely along racial lines that it probably wouldn’t occur to them that a black man could identify with something happening to a white man, and a preppy white man at that. That must be why writer Jemele Hill of the Atlantic could write something like this [emphasis mine]:

On Tuesday night, I was in an auditorium with 100 black men in the city of Baltimore, when the subject pivoted to Brett Kavanaugh. I expected to hear frustration that the sexual-assault allegations against him had failed to derail his Supreme Court appointment. Instead, I encountered sympathy. One man stood up and asked, passionately, “What happened to due process?” He was met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods.

Hill, who is a black woman (formerly a sportswriter), assumed that these black men would identify with the woman’s story of sexual assault, rather than the man’s story of false accusation. She thought they would accept and perhaps join in with the Democrats’ ridicule and demonizing of Kavanaugh’s rage at being falsely accused.

I’m not a black woman; Jemele Hill is. I don’t pretend for a moment to have my finger on the pulse of the black community or the feelings of black men, and yet I’m not the least bit surprised at their reaction. Anyone with even a smattering of historical knowledge, or a particle of imagination and empathy, should probably have expected it. I am virtually certain that Hill has enough historical knowledge (since I don’t know her, I have no idea about the imagination and empathy part) to have predicted it herself. And yet she did not; her politics blinded her.

David French (a man, but not a black man) has written this piece on the topic, in which he points out that it’s not just knowledge of history that drives this reaction on the part of black men, although that’s part of it. Black men are also the disproportionate targets of a tremendous percentage of the rape and/or sexual abuse accusations today, particularly in Title IX proceedings which have virtually eliminated due process. Between their history of having been lynched (the very definition of the lack of due process) and the reality of being accused of sexual crimes in the kangaroo courts of today’s colleges, is it any wonder that the black man speaking up so “passionately” (Kavanaugh spoke with passion, too) in that meeting Jemele Hill attended was “met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods” from the assembled group?

Hill was obviously shocked, however [emphasis mine]:

If you think Kavanaugh receiving some measure of support from black men in inner-city Baltimore is as strange as Taylor Swift suddenly feeling the need to become a modern-day Fannie Lou Hamer, then brace yourself: The caping for Kavanaugh does make a twisted kind of sense. Countless times, black men have had to witness the careers and reputations of other black men ruthlessly destroyed because of unproved rape and sexual-assault accusations.

Why “strange”? And why “twisted”? There’s nothing strange or twisted about it unless your mind is so set along separatist racial and class lines that you think black men can never empathize with the plight of a white man, and vice versa.

Hill continues [emphasis mine]:

Kavanaugh’s emotional defense of his reputation against the claims of a sympathetic white woman resonated with these unlikely allies. And it wasn’t just in Baltimore, at the town hall organized for Ozy Media’s “Take On America” series. This bizarre kinship was something I noticed in my Twitter mentions, too, where black men were tossing out examples of how white lies had wrecked black lives.

“Unlikely.” “Bizarre.” Hill can’t stop being gobsmacked by the common principles that unite this group with Kavanaugh and the obvious similarities. Race and class make it nearly impossible in her mind; that’s all she sees.

And yet she continues to make the case for exactly why these black men would identify with Kavanaugh:

A report released last year, examining 1,900 exonerations over the past three decades, found that 47 percent of the people exonerated were black, despite the fact that blacks make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population. In sexual-assault cases, blacks accounted for 22 percent of convictions, but 59 percent of exonerations.

Hill’s article is titled “What the Black Men Who Identify With Brett Kavanaugh Are Missing.” But basically, she makes a very weak to nonexistent case that they’re missing anything at all. She seems to be saying that because a higher percentage of black men than white men are accused of sexual assault and a higher percentage are convicted or exonerated, that somehow makes a difference and they shouldn’t identify with Kavanaugh. That’s a preposterous argument.

I’ll close with this video I found on YouTube, in which an eloquent black man explains how he feels about what happened to Kavanaugh:

[NOTE: I think the title of this piece would be a good slogan for the GOP to get into the public domain before election day.]