And You Are Lynching Negroes: Whataboutism as Moral Anaesthetic

The phrase entered Soviet usage in the 1930s and became a standing joke about itself: A u vas negrov linchuyut. And you are lynching Negroes.

It was the standard response to Western criticism of Soviet human rights practice, and it had the considerable advantage of referring to something real. The United States in the mid-twentieth century was in fact a country where lynchings occurred and where a substantial part of the population lived under legal racial subordination. The charge was true.

It was also not an answer to anything.

Whataboutism is a species of tu quoque — the appeal to hypocrisy — and its distinguishing feature is that it does not deny the allegation. It leaves the allegation entirely intact and changes what the conversation is about. The question was: did this happen, and is it wrong? The question becomes: which of us is worse?

That substitution works because of how moral judgment operates in practice. Absolute moral assessment is cognitively expensive and psychologically unsatisfying. Comparative assessment is neither. Festinger's social comparison work established that people evaluate themselves and others relative to available comparison targets rather than against abstract standards, and a comparison target supplied by the accused is a comparison target chosen for the purpose.

There is a second mechanism, which is the more damaging one. Moral outrage is a finite resource that seeks discharge. If the audience's outrage can be redirected onto the accuser, it is spent — and it is spent without producing any behavioral demand, because nobody is going to do anything about the accuser's distant sins. The audience leaves the exchange feeling that justice has been served on somebody, and the original allegation has cost the accused nothing.

This is moral licensing from chapter 29, executed rhetorically and in real time.

The technique's modern range is wide, because it is available to anyone who is accused of anything. State media use it. Corporations under investigation raise their competitors' records. Individuals accused of misconduct raise their accusers'. Political factions do it continuously and in both directions, and the result is an argument in which nobody has denied anything and everybody feels they have won.

The reason it is hard to counter is that the whataboutist's point is often true, and sometimes important. Western human rights criticism of the Soviet Union during the Jim Crow era was hypocritical. The hypocrisy was real, and worth saying.

Which is why the correct response is not to deny the counter-charge but to refuse the trade explicitly. The counter-charge may be entirely correct and it is a separate matter, to be taken up separately and on its own evidence. Whether this thing happened, and whether it was wrong, does not depend on the character of the person asking.

Said plainly and without heat, this holds the line. What loses it is defending the accuser, which accepts that their record is the topic — at which point the original question has been successfully replaced, and the exchange has become the status contest it was designed to be.