‘A black man is the holdout juror?… Whoa. I have to sit with that for just a second.’ Those were the words of Gayle King, co-host of CBS Mornings, after learning last weekend that the lone dissenting juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial was black.

The Lindsay Clancy case has shocked and divided people in equal measure. In January 2023, Clancy killed her three young children by strangling them to death with exercise bands, leaving their bodies in the basement of her Massachusetts home. She pleaded not guilty to murder by reason of insanity, with her lawyers arguing that she had been suffering from postpartum psychosis.

Last week, the case ended in a hung jury. Eleven of the 12 jurors agreed with the defence that Clancy was not responsible on the grounds of her insanity, but one juror – who happens to be black – insisted on her guilt. A retrial with a separate jury is now expected.

The case generated intense discussion about mental health, postpartum depression and the extent to which severe mental illness can affect a person’s responsibility for their actions. Many of us also watched, with some bewilderment, as hordes of women rallied behind a mother who had admitted to taking the lives of her own children. Throughout the trial, groups of supporters gathered outside the courthouse in a show of support for Clancy, either proclaiming her total innocence (some suggested her husband was really the murderer) or suggesting that, because of her mental health, Clancy was just as much of a victim as her dead children.

Since the jurors’ identities came to light, race has dominated the discussion. Put simply, Clancy’s progressive supporters are struggling to get to grips with the fact that the lone juror who thought she was guilty is black. One Clancy supporter’s disappointment has since gone viral. ‘As a non-practising white’, she said on TikTok, ‘I am surprised, and that changes the landscape of the conversation’.

This is where identity politics starts to become genuinely surreal. Why should the race of a juror ‘change the landscape’ of the debate? What does one man’s skin colour have to do with whether Clancy’s mental state absolved her of responsibility? For one thing, Clancy is a white woman, as were the three children she killed. Race had nothing to do with this case at all. And what in the world is a ‘non-practising white’?

We need to speak honestly: this is a form of racism. In the woke worldview, ‘white’ is no longer simply a description of someone’s race or ethnicity. It is a signal of politics and morality. Whiteness is oppression, the thinking goes, so the more distance you put between yourself and it, the more naturally aligned you become with the ‘victim’ of the story.

This is why this juror’s race appeared to matter so much. In a hierarchy in which black and white sit at opposite ends, a black person occupies the highest rank in the moral pecking order. This juror was therefore expected to know his role – to identify with the designated victim of the story. In this case, liberal feminists had decided it was Clancy. But when he deviated from this script, he blew the left’s identity-obsessed worldview to bits.

The woke often link ‘whiteness’ to certain characteristics, behaviours and attitudes. This is why there is no shortage of ‘black and brown’ people who have been told, at some point in their lives, that they are ‘acting white’, simply for the way they choose to speak or conduct themselves.

It is not just a playground insult, either. In response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture shared guidelines for talking about race that listed rational thinking, punctuality and hard work, among others, as ‘white’ values and norms. The bafflement over the black juror in the Clancy case draws from the same insidious, racialised way of thinking.

Would it be too much to ask these progressives to stop fixating on race, and to accept that thoughts, values, opinions and judgements need not be racialised at all? In a world still obsessed with identity politics, it seems that might be a big ask.

Here is a thought for Gayle King, the ‘non-practising whites’ and the Smithsonian guideline-writers of the world: black people do not need your permission to think for themselves. Nobody needs a second to ‘sit’ with that. Let people be judged on their actions alone, not on whether they conform to what is expected of their race.