The Rice Card
Condoleezza Rice arguably is about to become the most powerful black woman in the history of the world. Yet the left continues to smear her with images of ignorant black house-servants in the slavery days:
That's ironic, because one of the knocks against Rice in my (liberal) newsroom is that she's "not really black." And if you ask, "What did the black people in the newsroom think about that?" you obviously don't know much about journalism, because there are none. My boss hired one a few years back. He was frankly a bad hire, given a job far more difficult than his previous experience and little training to do it. I made friends with him, based on some common background, and I liked him. But the way he was mocked and derided by my co-workers was really chilling. They're still telling jokes about him, and he's been gone for five years now. They continue to laugh at his way of talking, his food, his hygeine, his poverty -- the caricature of him was not recognizable Stepin Fetchit stuff, but it was just as artificial.
Such people arrogantly claim the right to define the black race, to delimit it to a certain set of qualities and behaviors and certain paths through life, and to exert the full measure of social pressure, including public humiliation, on blacks who don't know their place. Isn't that the pith of racism? It inverts, but exactly recreates, the old white supremacist notion of the "race traitor."
My reflexive response is to scorn the hypocrisy of people who claim the right to hector the rest of us about racism and diversity yet fall into the gutter at the first opportunity.
But I'm still enough of a liberal, or perhaps just curious about the human mind, that I want to get inside the heads of such people and see how this happens.
People like Rice are considered fair game for such insults because they're perceived to be playing the stereotype role, voluntarily. In the minds of the Rice-bashers, any black person who aligns him- or herself with the Republican party and rises to power in it is, de facto, an Uncle Tom, adapting to a power structure that represses blacks by favoring corporations, opposing welfare programs, courting the votes of Southern whites -- you name it.
Never mind that, within the living memory of both Bush and Rice, the Democrats were the party of segregation. During the bombing summer of 1963, Rice's father, a minister in Birmingham, Alabama, helped other neighborhood men guard the streets at night to keep white vigilantes at bay. Rice said that since those days she has been a staunch defender of gun rights, which hardly aligns her with the modern Democratic Party, even though her position has nothing of Uncle Tom about it.
In the minds of the Rice-bashers, though, their victim deserves these insulting stereotypes as punishment for her choices. When they pillory her with "Gone With the Wind" images, they probably believe they are simply using an available historical metaphor to describe a current situation that offends them. Yet the objection to racist caricature is not whether it is true or not, but whether it is degrading to the other race, or causes what tort law refers to as "the intentional infliction of emotional distress."
Then at some point the Rice-bashers have separated themselves from the mass of people, and come to think of themselves as the privileged few, who "get it," and who therefore have the right to bludgeon certain blacks with racist imagery. Whites who have proved their soundness by denouncing Trent Lott's praise of Strom Thurmond or marching with a "Free Mumia" sign (while surrendering none of the real privileges of whiteness) are privileged to cast stones at Condi Rice in the name of party politics.
At the same time they can feel assured that this does not put them on the level of the lower-middle-class factory worker, whose resentment of the quotas of affirmative action can only spring from ignorance, hatred, and right-wing propaganda.
All of this reminds me why I've learned to be more afraid of people with intense political agendas when those people are divorced from an inkling of absolute good and evil. George Orwell warned of this quality in the left of his day; some animals are more equal than others.
By what right do certain white Americans arrogate to themselves the privilege (for so they seem to feel it) of casting the imagery of racism at certain blacks? How does it advance the cause of diversity to say, "certain words and thoughts are off-limits to you, but not to me"?
An old man in my town, of dubious sanity and given to mumbling to himself in the streets, passes a black woman, and she hears the "N" word from his lips. She turns to confront him, then she hears it again. So she finds a police officer and has the old man arrested. Under the state's Ethnic Intimidation and Institutional Vandalism Act of 1982, a district justice sentences him to 30 days in jail, a $200 fine plus court costs. (In the same week, a local man who whacked his wife in the head with an electric mixer and threatened to kill her got a year's probation.)
While I was walking home, considering the consequences of that, I passed a house on my block, where a teen-ager stood on the porch in a dark blue sweat suit, dancing to rap music blaring through the open front door; the song repeated and repeated the phrase, "Whatcha gonna do, n---er?" And I thought, "We forbid ourselves to degrade you, but we will stand by and applaud as you degrade yourselves." And I thought, for about the millionth time since I started thinking about it, "which is the worse racism?"
That's ironic, because one of the knocks against Rice in my (liberal) newsroom is that she's "not really black." And if you ask, "What did the black people in the newsroom think about that?" you obviously don't know much about journalism, because there are none. My boss hired one a few years back. He was frankly a bad hire, given a job far more difficult than his previous experience and little training to do it. I made friends with him, based on some common background, and I liked him. But the way he was mocked and derided by my co-workers was really chilling. They're still telling jokes about him, and he's been gone for five years now. They continue to laugh at his way of talking, his food, his hygeine, his poverty -- the caricature of him was not recognizable Stepin Fetchit stuff, but it was just as artificial.
Such people arrogantly claim the right to define the black race, to delimit it to a certain set of qualities and behaviors and certain paths through life, and to exert the full measure of social pressure, including public humiliation, on blacks who don't know their place. Isn't that the pith of racism? It inverts, but exactly recreates, the old white supremacist notion of the "race traitor."
My reflexive response is to scorn the hypocrisy of people who claim the right to hector the rest of us about racism and diversity yet fall into the gutter at the first opportunity.
But I'm still enough of a liberal, or perhaps just curious about the human mind, that I want to get inside the heads of such people and see how this happens.
People like Rice are considered fair game for such insults because they're perceived to be playing the stereotype role, voluntarily. In the minds of the Rice-bashers, any black person who aligns him- or herself with the Republican party and rises to power in it is, de facto, an Uncle Tom, adapting to a power structure that represses blacks by favoring corporations, opposing welfare programs, courting the votes of Southern whites -- you name it.
Never mind that, within the living memory of both Bush and Rice, the Democrats were the party of segregation. During the bombing summer of 1963, Rice's father, a minister in Birmingham, Alabama, helped other neighborhood men guard the streets at night to keep white vigilantes at bay. Rice said that since those days she has been a staunch defender of gun rights, which hardly aligns her with the modern Democratic Party, even though her position has nothing of Uncle Tom about it.
In the minds of the Rice-bashers, though, their victim deserves these insulting stereotypes as punishment for her choices. When they pillory her with "Gone With the Wind" images, they probably believe they are simply using an available historical metaphor to describe a current situation that offends them. Yet the objection to racist caricature is not whether it is true or not, but whether it is degrading to the other race, or causes what tort law refers to as "the intentional infliction of emotional distress."
Then at some point the Rice-bashers have separated themselves from the mass of people, and come to think of themselves as the privileged few, who "get it," and who therefore have the right to bludgeon certain blacks with racist imagery. Whites who have proved their soundness by denouncing Trent Lott's praise of Strom Thurmond or marching with a "Free Mumia" sign (while surrendering none of the real privileges of whiteness) are privileged to cast stones at Condi Rice in the name of party politics.
At the same time they can feel assured that this does not put them on the level of the lower-middle-class factory worker, whose resentment of the quotas of affirmative action can only spring from ignorance, hatred, and right-wing propaganda.
All of this reminds me why I've learned to be more afraid of people with intense political agendas when those people are divorced from an inkling of absolute good and evil. George Orwell warned of this quality in the left of his day; some animals are more equal than others.
By what right do certain white Americans arrogate to themselves the privilege (for so they seem to feel it) of casting the imagery of racism at certain blacks? How does it advance the cause of diversity to say, "certain words and thoughts are off-limits to you, but not to me"?
An old man in my town, of dubious sanity and given to mumbling to himself in the streets, passes a black woman, and she hears the "N" word from his lips. She turns to confront him, then she hears it again. So she finds a police officer and has the old man arrested. Under the state's Ethnic Intimidation and Institutional Vandalism Act of 1982, a district justice sentences him to 30 days in jail, a $200 fine plus court costs. (In the same week, a local man who whacked his wife in the head with an electric mixer and threatened to kill her got a year's probation.)
While I was walking home, considering the consequences of that, I passed a house on my block, where a teen-ager stood on the porch in a dark blue sweat suit, dancing to rap music blaring through the open front door; the song repeated and repeated the phrase, "Whatcha gonna do, n---er?" And I thought, "We forbid ourselves to degrade you, but we will stand by and applaud as you degrade yourselves." And I thought, for about the millionth time since I started thinking about it, "which is the worse racism?"
