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too lightly. Blackface—a form of mockery of black people that dates to 19th-century minstrel shows— “did not become insensitive or ugly in the past month.” It has always made black people cringe. So why did it take Fallon, Kimmel, and Tina Fey (whose 30 Rock had many blackface moments) years to apologize? “I didn’t know” isn’t good enough.

As for the statues, said Candida Moss in TheDaily Beast.com, “history is full of torn-down monuments.” It’s always been a way for newly free societies—in Russia, say, or Iraq—to signal their emergence from oppression. Today’s activists are merely continuing that noble tradition. But do we really want to tear down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? said Charles Blow in The New York Times. “Abso-fricking-lutely!” Slave owners treated black people like animals; even at the time, some men and women publicly condemned the practice as “morally reprehensible.” No one who chose to own other human beings—including Washington and Jefferson—“should be honored with monuments in public spaces.”

Tearing down statues will not change our society for the better, said John McWhorter in Reason.com. Nor will getting people fired for something they said or did in 1998. In the ongoing spasm of righteous indignation, it’s “performance and fury” that is the point—not true social change. That’s putting it mildly, said Andrew Sullivan in NYMag.com. With its intolerance of any moral nuance, its “coerced” public apologies, and “its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives,” the anti-racist movement is less reminiscent of the 1960s civil rights struggle than of Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. “We aren’t there yet,” but unless we reject that totalitarian mindset as emphatically as we reject racism, “we soon will be.”