Bait As We Say, Not As We Do
Some gall* on the part of the race-baiting Associated Press. Analysis: “Racist” claims defuse once-powerful word.
Everybody’s racist, it seems.
Republican Rep. Joe Wilson? Racist, because he shouted “You lie!” at the first black president. Health care protesters, affirmative action supporters? Racist. And Barack Obama? He’s the “Racist in Chief,” wrote a leader of the recent conservative protest in Washington.
But if everybody’s racist, is anyone?
The word is being sprayed in all directions, creating a hall of mirrors that is draining the scarlet R of its meaning and its power, turning it into more of a spitball than a stigma.
“It gets to the point where we don’t have a word that we use to call people racist who actually are,” said John McWhorter, who studies race and language at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
“The more abstract and the more abusive we get in the way we use the words, then the harder it is to talk about what we originally meant by those terms,” he said.
What the word once meant — and still does in Webster’s dictionary — is someone who believes in the inherent superiority of a particular race or is prejudiced against others.
…
Overt bigotry waned, but many still see shadows of prejudice across the landscape and cry racism.
Well put. Let’s start with the Associated Press, and some of its more blatant race-baiting in the 2008 presidential campaign.
AP “analysis” deems Palin’s “palling around with terrorists” hit on Obama to be “racially tinged.” There’s nothing actually approaching evidence to support this bizarre claim. It takes the AP fully seventeen paragraphs to get around to the speculative leaps and aspersions that pass for an argument.
AP-Yahoo poll: Dem bigots will croak Obama run. Weird study that appears to apply vague, generalized racial stereotypes to attitudes toward a particular candidate, “suggests” a critical percentage of Dems will veer off over race. Subtext for future reference: McCain-Palin, choice of bigots. One problem pollsters failed to correct for: Their own prejudice.
Don’t worry about the AP, by the way. The analysis about the cheapening of the word “racist,” while it starts nicely with that Manhattan Institute quote and the Jimmy Carter reference, ignores the widespread attacks on dissent from the likes of Maureen Dowd, Janeane Garofalo, and US Rep Hank Johnson, and quickly reverts to bashing conservatives again, with obscure examples of people you’ve never heard of:
Mark Williams, one of the leaders of the Sept. 12 rallies in Washington D.C., headlined a blog entry about the arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr at his own home by a white police officer, “Racist In Chief Obama Fanning Flames of Racism.” And too many bloggers to count are saying that Congressman Jim Clyburn, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and has called Wilson and other health care protesters racist, is the real racist himself.
And this analysis is not about the use and gross abuse of the race card to shut down dissent and gain advantage. It’s about how conservatives are demeaning the word racist by throwing it around loosely.
This infinite loop is the inevitable result of years of black identity politics, which created a blueprint for whites who feel threatened by America’s changing demographics, says Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of “The New White Nationalism In America.”
While there is the barest, indirect, token reference to the Gates matter, astonishingly, the AP manages to get out of this “analysis” without mentioning Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the entire profession of race-baiting that has sprung up in the last 40 years or so. But I suppose there is some comfort to be taken in this condescending exit:
“We need to rethink what is racist and who can legitimately call whom racist,” Swain said, citing the argument that blacks can’t be racist because racism requires power.
“With a black president, a black attorney general, and blacks holding various power positions around the country, now might be a time when we can concede that anyone can express attitudes and actions that others can justifiably characterize as racist.”
Perhaps this is even a strange symbol of racial progress — equal-opportunity victimization, so to speak.
“In 100 years, when people chronicle how America got past race,” said McWhorter, “the uptick in white people calling blacks racist is going to be seen as a symptom of the end.”
Unbalanced, inadequate and uninformative as an analysis of the current use and abuse of the word, maybe. But I suppose, charitably, this could be viewed as the AP’s “Dawn over Tokyo” moment.
* Yeah, I know. News flash: AP has some gall …
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Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:56 am on Friday, September 18, 2009
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September 18th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
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