Paging Attorney General Holder: Can we talk?
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Perhaps I spoke too soon last week when I described U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's approach to starting a national discussion about race as "ham-fisted." You'll recall that Mr. Holder called us a "nation of cowards" for maintaining social segregation long after the battles for integration had been won.
While I agreed with his overall point, his didactic tone bothered me. It lacked the subtlety needed to get past the defenses of people in denial. There was also something hypocritical about accusing Americans of ducking honest dialogue about race when his own boss made a point of de-emphasizing it during the presidential campaign. We would prefer that Mr. Holder indict Dick Cheney for crimes against the U.S. Constitution, not point fingers at us.
That was last week. This week I'm feeling a lot more sympathetic toward the attorney general's position.
So, what happened in the interim to make me a pessimist, you ask? Watching the hysterical reactions of conservatives (and a few liberals) castigate Mr. Holder for even daring to suggest that the election of Barack Obama, by itself, doesn't make us "post-racial" may have had something to do with it.
Let's face it. We may have to abandon subtlety altogether when it comes to a particular brand of American racist knuckleheadedness. Mayor Dean Grose of Los Alamitos, Calif., is proof that an honest discussion about race is not only long overdue, but probably wouldn't do any good anyway.
Mayor Grose was somehow smart enough to get himself appointed mayor of a town in Orange County but now claims to be too dumb to have realized that he was insulting a black businesswoman when he sent her an e-mail with the image of a watermelon patch on the White House lawn with the slogan "No Easter Egg Hunt This Year" on it.
Mayor Grose (sounds like "gross") insists that he had no idea that there was a racial stereotype about black people having an insatiable lust for watermelons. In fact, Mayor Grose had no intention of insulting her. He considers the black businesswoman a "friend." Anyone who cries racism in the absence of clear racist intent is the one with the racial hang-up.
"I'm sorry," Mayor Grose told The Associated Press. "It wasn't sent to offend her personally -- or anyone -- from the standpoint of the African-American race." Look at the passive construction at the heart of his apology. Of course he didn't mean to offend her. It was just a random assemblage of words and images that migrated from his e-mail box to hers. (He announced late Thursday that he would resign on Monday.)
Earlier this month, about 100 electrical workers from Pennsylvania traveled to Madison County, Ark., to help restore power after an ice storm took out nearly every power pole in the county. About 30 of these electrical workers were black. The Madison County Record reported that they weren't exactly greeted like liberators by some good ol' boys of the all-white county. They were "subjected to racial epithets and other forms of harassment."
According to Madison County Sheriff Phillip Morgan, "Some kids were driving around them, waving Rebel flags and mouthing to them. They showed some weapons and were supposedly intoxicated." The boys of Madison County may not have had power for a few days, but it's never too cold to wave the Rebel flag. Freezing in the backwoods of Arkansas is preferable to accepting help from black folks bearing stinking 'lectricity.
One could argue that the watermelon mayor of Los Alamitos and the rednecks of Madison County are as much symptoms of America's festering class problem as our willed racial amnesia. Rather than feel victimized by this or even nonsense like the now-infamous New York Post editorial cartoon this month, it's probably more productive to acknowledge that these events are on the freakish ends of the American experience and not at the center of things.
Sure, some of us more than others could benefit from a long overdue chat about race. But the truth is that race is only one of many hang-ups we have as Americans including sexism, anti-intellectualism, homophobia, religious intolerance, xenophobia, discrimination against the disabled, a tolerance for cruelty to animals in the name of food production and a fear of talking about class bias. Hell, we might as well talk about the heartbreak of psoriasis while we're at it.
It isn't that Attorney General Holder went too far in his comments last week. He didn't go far enough.
First Published February 27, 2009 12:00 am
