The question is why this is considered such a transgression. Over the past two weeks, countless reporters and commentators have documented that COVID-19 is hitting black people harder in many areas nationwide and that this is because of entrenched race-based disparities in our society. Why, then, is it so appalling that Adams did not flag this as his main message, when the message has been made so resonantly clear elsewhere?

Members of a certain highly educated cohort consider it sacrosanct that those speaking for or to black people always and eternally stress structural flaws in America’s sociopolitical fabric past and present as the cause of black ills. To mention that there are more concrete and local solutions to various things ailing black America, regardless of their origin, is traitorous—even blasphemous. Whatever the volume and rhetorical brilliance of this ideology, it is indeed an ideology. Specifically, it represents a way of thinking that has become especially popular among, for example, the black intelligentsia over the past decade or three, but has much less purchase among black people in general. The writers and thinkers give an impression that their take is simple truth, when it has actually devolved into a reflexive, menacing brand of language policing.

We have been here before. Not long ago, readers were assessing the proposition from The New York Times that American history begins not in 1776 but in 1619 when the first Africans were bought to these shores in bondage. One intent of this proposal is to discourage any sense that disparities between blacks and whites are due to some kind of black inferiority. We are to keep front and center that all black problems today can be traced to the attitudes and structures that set in starting in 1619.

Adam Serwer: The fight over the 1619 Project is not about facts

Yet we might ask what that kind of news is supposed to do for a black person having problems here in 2020 (such as, perhaps, suffering from effects of the coronavirus). A pragmatic black activism today can focus on any number of strategies, such as ending the war on drugs, transforming educational practice for poor black kids, and making long-acting, reversible contraceptives more easily available to all poor women. Notably, all of these things could happen without any particular musings about what happened in Virginia in 1619. However, among some highly educated people, this qualifies as “not getting it.” In these circles, the 1619 idea has been rapturously received, despite trenchant questions about its historical accuracy.

We can go further back, when Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, was roasted for supposedly condescending to a black audience in urging black men to take a larger role in rearing their children. Even though he did this with a vernacular warmth that his audience ate up with a spoon, legions of black thinkers reviled the president for addressing behavior rather than the broader causes that made counsel such as his necessary in the first place. “Barack’s been talking down to black people,” Jesse Jackson complained on a live microphone a few weeks afterward. More than a decade later, commentators were still scolding Obama for “finger-wagging” at black people instead of dwelling on root causes.