Catherine Pugh, Esq.
2 min readNov 14, 2020

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Nah - you had to work pretty hard to thread that needle.

1, Wise covered criminal intent - LITERALLY - in the very next paragraph. " Yes, my criminal liability will depend upon my level of intent, and the degree of civil liability may as well; but whether or not injury itself occurred — whether or not there was harm worth noting — has absolutely nothing to do with that."

2, your framing is incomplete and deceptive. The premise here is this: victims of harm don't need to know the wrongdoer's state of mind to determine whether he or she has been harmed. You then rebut as if the premise ends at "state of mind."

It doesn't. A victim needn't know an actor's state of mind to assess whether the actor inflicted race abuse.

Needing to know about future abuse does not implicate assessing past or actual harm.

3, you pivot - again - to legal culpability when legal culpability is beyond irrelevant. Negligence is a legal standard. Racism and racist conduct here are not.

4, sociopathy? WTF?

5, then - with a whole lotta smoke and dry ice - you "tada!" with "therefore treating two not just unrelated but competing needs the same way is counter-productive and nobody'll care what you say." Wait. What?

Assessing racism is accessing racism. Accessing a crime is assessing a crime. Assessing civil l/b, future harm, mental balance is assessing civil l/b, future harm, mental balance.

They are not related. They do not share need. They do not share standard. They are literally five different issues, with five different tests, and for five different harms, needs, or values.

Whether one MEANS to create race-harm is not a part of the test for whether one HAS created race harm, and defining every other instance on the planet where SOM is important doesn't change that even slightly.

Impressive footwork, though.

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Catherine Pugh, Esq.
Catherine Pugh, Esq.

Written by Catherine Pugh, Esq.

Private Counsel. Former DOJ-CRT, Special Litigation Section, Public Defender; Adjunct Professor (law & undergrad). Developed Race & Law course.

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