On the other side, I took a course in college called “Racism in American Culture”, which was effectively an alternate-history rundown of the black experience in the Americas/U.S. from 1492 to present. At one point, a woman in the class asked demurely whether you had to be somewhat crazy to continue to function day-to-day knowing all that. The professor responded that the level of denial you need to avoid flipping your shit when you know some facts has to come fairly close to a clinical condition in and of itself, yes.

Back to disliking Graham, is this gem: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” –James Baldwin

But the games he plays with connotations while specifically laying out definition inconsistent with your own is an evil rhetorical trick, just as bad as the time he wrote an essay to call a critic an idiot without telling any of his other readers. It’s quite insidious — the laymen who don’t see the definitional problems are fine with accepting that artists are scientists or that parents lie specifically to kids with purposes in mind, and the experts themselves give pause before arguing that artists are intellectually lazy or that religion isn’t an obstacle to scientific inquiry. They’re inclined to agree with the tone, even though the facts are sketchy at best.