First, conservatives who resist the idea that today’s racism can be legislated away need to think harder about how to honor the particularities of the African-American experience.

You don’t want to take down every Confederate statue or dethrone slave-owning founders? Okay: What monuments to the slave or Jim Crow experience will you enthusiastically support? What more capacious retellings of history, with black heroes instead of sentimentalized Confederates, are you willing to endorse?

You don’t want the federal government interfering with local law enforcement? Okay: Then when black people are obviously victims of local institutions, are you willing to elevate and defend them, to make them a cause célèbre, to act as if their concerns are yours as well?