The particularly uncharitable reading of that quote that jumped to my mind when I read it is "but why can't I, a white guy, say the n-word?" But this probably isn't what Graham actually had in mind.
I think Graham is trying to operate in some idealized plane of pure logical statements where you can speak truthful axioms and reason from them. He misses that in the real world statements have a context, are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and imply consequences.
There are things you can say which are "true" but which miss the point or suggest that you're pushing for a certain policy outcome. There's a lot of situations where you can say "the statistics say X and so we should do Y" and the (fairly valid) rebuttal is, essentially, "why did you accept the societal structure that produced those statistics?"
This was also the example that came to my mind. It is perhaps one of the most iconic examples, and as such, absent a concrete example or further clarification, I don't see why you shouldn't assume that this is representative of what the author had in mind.
That is very far from 'the worst' I can imagine in someone. Further, it is hardly 'automatic' - it is a response to a hypothetical situation the author posited, for which multiple people considered that as the most prominent concrete example. If the author did not intend that, he did a poor job of making his argument clear.
Oh, I doubt he really wanted that. The sort of thing I suspect he was actually referencing is the "black people commit X% of all crimes" / "racial differences in IQ test scores show..." talking points. (Or their equivalents in other fields. Women-in-computer-science, etc.)
Why is possession of crack a more serious offense than possession of the same quantity of powder cocaine?
Is the single crime of selling a loose cigarette on the street equivalent to the single crime of defrauding tens of millions of dollars from investors?
How many officers are tasked with arresting people for "quality of life" offenses like loitering and disturbing the peace vs. tasked with arresting people for wage theft through unpaid overtime and time card fraud?
Are your statistics for "committing" crime in fact statistics for convictions? Are there systemic reasons those might be very different numbers?
If all of these are more useful subjects for discussion, what is the purpose of even making the original statement?
I think Graham is trying to operate in some idealized plane of pure logical statements where you can speak truthful axioms and reason from them. He misses that in the real world statements have a context, are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and imply consequences.
There are things you can say which are "true" but which miss the point or suggest that you're pushing for a certain policy outcome. There's a lot of situations where you can say "the statistics say X and so we should do Y" and the (fairly valid) rebuttal is, essentially, "why did you accept the societal structure that produced those statistics?"