[QUOTE=Beware of Doug]
Imus opened his mouth and fell foul of forces that are beyond his control. Beyond anybody’s control. The conflicting emotions, interests, and principles at work here pushed something into motion that’s bigger than all of us, immune to rational discussion, and occasionally eats someone alive. Justly or unjustly. It happens, and there’s nothing to be done.
[/QUOTE]
This comment really strikes me. I think, one one hand, it’s a cogent, elliptical assessment of the whole affair; on the other hand, it’s distressing and deeply unsatisfying to consider the idea that any rational public discussion is only the background noise to the primary forces at play here. Distressing…but not surprising. Beware of Doug could easily be talking about our political system, about George Allen. It doesn’t seem to matter that something like that is so much more important than a radio show. Our most important public institutions bend and sway with such winds, while often remaining rigid and inflexible in the face of real, pervasive problems for which rational discussion would demand solutions.
And that’s not to say racism isn’t a real problem, just that any rational discussion about the most significant racism–by which I mean the manifestations of racism that most directly affect people’s lives and well-being–would quickly have settled on far better uses for our time, attention, and money than the one to which they were put this past week.
Racism is everywhere to be found, plain to see in virtually any aspect of our society. It’s endemic, and yet we are obsessed with whether or not true racism is lurking in the dark corners of one man’s mind. Because we can’t truly answer that question with any real degree of certainty, we will beat it to death. Having established precedence–even a preponderance of such past statements–it’s tempting to call a spade a spade.
I think most of us would agree the statement was tasteless, even in the context of a failed attempt at humor. Isolated from that context, of course, it’s downright vile and hurtful. But I think most people are cognizant enough to know the difference, and can take into account the mitigating original context of the statement. And if that were mitigating enough, it would go would have gone unnoticed in the same way countless other poorly-conceived jokes go unnoticed every day. Almost as if to say, “if this is our sense of humor, then our sense of humor is evil. Are we really joking about things like this?”
“Hypocrisy!” my white friends cry, and so it is. Does that make Sharpton and Jackson hypocrites? Well, even if we agree to forgo any examination of past events and statements from these men, I say that unless they bring the same forces to bear on the subculture that is responsible for putting such phrases into the national vernacular in the first place, they will have shown themselves to be, if not hypocrites, then common opportunists unworthy of our attention. It’s not a judgment I’d be willing to make based on one or even a handful of events in isolation, but on the measure of their efforts overall, even if just from this moment forward.
That subculture–which is represented by more than just two ethnic groups–is infinitely more profitable financially than Don Imus, and manifestly more damaging than his even his most offensive remarks taken together. And I say this having supported that subculture, probably as much if not more than the average American. So are we now going to say that if there is language that is too sensitive to use in jokes, then it is also too sensitive to glorified in music and film (or for that matter, to sensitive to be repeated verbatim on the public airwaves ad nauseum)? Nobody (sensible) wants censorship, and I’m not suggesting that; I’m asking: are we going to exercise our prerogative to simply turn it off, to not buy it, to not support it, to decry it whenever it shows up in public?
If not, then yes: this is hypocrisy. But even then, so what? If there’s no rational discussion, if we’re really only just being pushed by emotional and reactive forces largely beyond our control, then decrying hypocrisy is just a red herring. Because it’s not as if reason and consistency, were they to suddenly replace it, would effect a better outcome–we’ve already established that we’re not governed by reason and consistency, so what’s the real difference?
The entire basis of racism is hypocrisy. Did anyone really believe all men “are created equal” or did they just want to believe it? You wouldn’t even have to go back 50 years to see institutionalized hypocrisy taken for granted, in everything from separate drinking fountains to the murder of Emmett Till. You can call it liberal guilt; I call it delusional to think that we now have an even field, only a few decades after the civil rights movement began, that everybody should now being playing fair and consistently. As if now that white people are trying to play fair, black people should greet them as liberators.
It doesn’t surprise me at all to see hypocrisy on the part of those trying to banish racism when so much hypocrisy went into its acceptance, when so much of it still survives to this day. If this is the price we pay for moving forward, so be it. We should hold our leaders to their words and make them accountable for their inconsistencies, but we don’t, and until that changes, we shouldn’t be surprised when they fail us.