slate | This is the central thing to understand about what happened in
Dallas: Black people who target whites are fundamentally allied with
white people who target blacks. They’re on the same team: the race war
team. It’s a lot like the global struggle over jihadism, in which
Muslims who hate Christians collaborate, in effect, with Christians who
hate Muslims. In the case of jihadism, the real struggle isn’t between
two religions. It’s between people who want religious war and people who don’t. The same is true of race: Either you’re on the race war team, or you’re against it.
The attack in Dallas—allegedly committed by Micah Johnson, a black man—comes barely a year after a white man, Dylann Roof, allegedly shot nine black people to death in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof told friends, and later police, that he wanted “to start a race war.” “He wanted it to be white with white, and black with black,” said a friend.
