TO BE FAIR, HE WAS NEVER A QUICK LEARNER: Charles Blow’s sudden revelation on the universality of racism.

It’s always somewhat amusing to watch a certain kind of anti-racist progressive reckon with the fact that various non-white groups can dislike one another, and that the way that that animosity manifests is — at least in the contemporary United States — often far more bitter and explicitly racist than white racism itself. Blow doesn’t explain how or why the anti-black racism of the Latino L.A. councilmembers is “the work of white supremacy” — these are the kinds of things that are asserted, not argued — but then again, recognizing that ethnic conflict and tribalism exist everywhere, across time, place, and race, would be deeply inconvenient for a number of progressive premises about America and the logic of intersectionality.

The fact is that non-whites are often every bit as racist as whites, for reasons that have far more to do with the brokenness of human nature than any abstract system of white supremacy. Blow himself has acknowledged this in the past — in response to a 2016 story about a Chinese detergent commercial promoting its product’s ability to turn a black man into a fairer-skinned Asian one, the Times columnist thundered: “Anti-black racism is a GLOBAL scourge!” In fact, the United States is far less racist than other comparable multiracial societies — Hollywood movies hoping to make inroads in the Chinese market infamously diminished or fully cut out black characters to appeal to the country’s antipathy to blackness. But I don’t expect Blow to reckon with those contradictions anytime soon. If you’re a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

It’s hard to teach a man something when his salary depends on not learning it. And Blow’s role at the NYT depends on not recognizing certain obvious truths that, if recognized, would wreck the preferred narrative.