One of the big news stories in Philadelphia this week has to do with the fallout from a series of controversial exchanges between a city councilman’s aide and a local broadcast journalist.

The controversy pivots on the fact that the aide, a black woman, held up a handwritten sign during a council meeting accusing the journalist and his station, Fox29, of racism. One of the makeshift signs read “Jeff Cole KKK.” Cole is the journalist in question, and he’d been targeting the aide, Latrice Bryant, as part of an ongoing probe into allegedly falsified time sheets at City Hall.

If you don’t know about the story, Fox29’s version of things (above) includes videotape of the two hastily made signs (ostensibly flashed to shame the cameraman into turning off the camera) and of Bryant’s boss, Councilman Wilson Goode, Jr., chiding Cole by telling him, “don’t you ever disrespect a black woman like that again.”

Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Annette John-Hall did a great job trying to make sense of the entire affair, what she calls “The Loose Leaf Race Card,” a phrase she deploys quite hesitantly. “Usually, I hate the term race card,” she writes. “Overused and misused, it’s an offensive catch-all preemptively thrown out to dismiss any valid concerns about race. Accuse someone of playing the race card, conversation over.”

But she admits that Bryant seems to be invoking race in less than productive ways. John-Hall also chatted with me briefly before her piece on the case, and she quotes me making a similar point: “It really does do a disservice to the more serious and subtle forms of racism people encounter every day.”

Part of the problem with Bryant’s use of racism in this instance (and you should check out the three-minute video to see her racially accusatory signs) is that she tries to use pre-1960s terminology (and conceptualizations of racial reasoning) for a decidedly post-60s exchange. Even if Cole was targeting her for reasons that had to do with race (and there is no proof that he was), it certainly wasn’t an open-and-shut case of KKK-esque race hatred. And it also isn’t clear that Fox29 has a history of disproportionately targeting black officials with its investigatory reports. But none of that is to say that she couldn’t feel suspicious about their preoccupation with one lone black female employee’s daily conduct (or potential misconduct).

By framing her response the way she did, she has forced herself into a version of the Cynthia McKinney corner, and it is clear that she’ll have to apologize for the accusation. Moreover, Jeff Cole is able to occupy the high ground reserved for the wrongly accused, which is why his report on the incident is saturated with what seems like righteous indignation. In the end, I don’t necessarily know that a combination of her structural vulnerabilities (vis-a-vis gender and race) didn’t grease the wheels for Cole’s decision about the employee to target. But that isn’t the same thing as Cole donning a KKK mask and burning a torch on Bryant’s front lawn.

As a society, we have to figure out better ways to make sense of contemporary racial issues and their newfangled subtleties — without recourse to the too-easy and self-evidential language of KKK’d certainty. It usually doesn’t do justice to the specifics of our current racial moment.