Hilzoy has written a great post responding to Ferraro’s latest, racist op-ed. Go check it out.
Hilzoy also points to this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Slate:
There is peculiar bit of jujitsu that white public figures have employed recently whenever they’re called to account for saying something stupid about black people. When the hard questions start flying, said figure deflects them by claiming that any critical interrogation is tantamount to calling them a racist, which they most assuredly are not.
[List of various racist statements by public figures, who then said it was just crazy to use the “R” word, snipped.]
It gives me no joy to report that Geraldine Ferraro has now applied to join the ranks of the obviously nonracist. I was 8 when she ran for vice president and vaguely aware that a party that would promote a woman for an executive office might be a party that would one day give a kid like me a fair shake. Thus I’ve retched while watching Ferraro beeline to any television studio that would have her, flaunting her rainbow bona fides, and claiming that she’s being attacked “because she’s white” and demonized as a racist. […]
The bar for racism has been raised so high that one need be a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party to qualify. Had John McCain said that Hillary Clinton was only competitive in the presidential race because she was a woman, there’d be no dispute over whether the comment was sexist. And yet when the equivalent is said about a black person, it’s not only not racist, but any criticism of the statement is interpreted as an act of character assassination.
Aaargh!
Ta-Nehisi is one of my must-read bloggers, and the point about the raising of the bar for “racism” is right on target. It’s sucks that he detracted from his article with a single sentence of needless oppression olympics - especially since on his own blog, he’s frequently argued against such comparisons.
He continues:
In some measure, the narrowing of racism is an unfortunate relic of the civil rights movement, when activists got mileage out of dehumanizing racists and portraying them as ultra-violent Southern troglodytes. Whites may have been horrified by the fire hoses and police dogs turned on children, but they could rest easy knowing that neither they nor anyone they’d ever met would do such a thing. But most racism—indeed, the worst racism—is quaint and banal. There’s nothing sensationalistic about redlining or job discrimination.
This is something I’ve seen more often than I can count. People’s logic goes like this:
1) Racists are monsters in their hearts.
2) I know that in my heart, I’m not a monster.
3) Therefore, I can’t be racist.
4) How dare you call me a racist!
You can pretty much replace “racist” with “sexist” or “homophobe” or any sort of bigot, and the above “logic” will continue to be played out in thousands of conversations every day.
For example, I recently read this painful exchange between two great Canadian cartoonists, Dave Sim and Chester Brown. I say it was painful because Sim was at one time an important role model for me. Since then, he’s become a belligerent misogynist, who argues (among other things) that women are intellectually inferior to men.
Brown — a Toronto cartoonist and friend of Sim’s who has stood by Sim for years — argued, as nicely as he possibly could, that Sim’s views meet “the common usage definition” of misogyny. Sim responded:
In other words you think I’m the gender equivalent of a racist. This is what I’ve come to realize: that people genuinely believe that I’m the worst imaginable thing (literally: a non-person, a sub-human) in our society. That being the case the only honorable thing is to withdraw from society completely and limit my contact with society to necessities (my rep at Diamond, people I buy food from). Would you associate with anyone who thought you were a subhuman? […]
RE: Visits to Toronto…Would you associate with anyone you thought were a subhuman?
Hard to imagine a clearer-cut case of “I can’t be a bigot, because I’m not a monster” logic.
