The Times Disappears Language On The 'Undeclared War Against Blackness'

The New York Times published an op-ed last week titled “What White America Fails to See,” by the prominent Georgetown University sociologist Michael Eric Dyson. The essay was published online on the evening of July 7 in response to the killings of black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. It offered a harsh assessment of the collective culpability and blindness of white Americans, calling the killings part of “an undeclared war against blackness.”

After reading Dyson’s op-ed, I sat down to write a commentary on it for the website of Commonweal magazine. But when I went to post my piece the next morning, I clicked on the link to Dyson’s essay and discovered it had been substantially altered ― “updated to reflect news developments,” as the Times website put it. Though the note didn’t specify, it obviously referred to what had happened during the night before, soon after Dyson’s op-ed first appeared: A black man in Dallas had murdered five police officers, reportedly seeking revenge for the deaths Dyson referenced.