NB: Please also see update below.
On
Friday, Matt Welch tweeted out
The Independents is a show on Fox Business
featuring (Lisa) Kennedy (Montgomery), of MTV fame, Matt Welch, editor in chief
of Reason magazine, and Kmele Foster,
entrepreneur and former chief of America’s Future Foundation, a DC-based
non-profit dedicated to developing the next generation of right-of-center
public policy folks.
I
understand the nature of TV commentary doesn’t lend itself well to nuance and
thorough explanation, but I found Kmele’s explanation surprisingly vapid and devoid
of evidence.
First of
all, if one chooses to talk about racism broadly, as Matt’s tweet indicated,***
whether or not white people get to use “nigger” should be well down the list of
concerns. Poverty, education, incarceration, alienation, and disparate
treatment in the public realm are far more important than whether white people
sing along to ‘Niggas in Paris.’ Indeed, even broaching the topic because a
handful of whites have had career disruptions for perceived racial
transgressions—both fair and foul—is in itself myopic and inherently dismissive
of the history and legacy of racism in this country. But here we are.
Here’s
my transcript of the relevant parts of the segment:
Kmele:
“I only [get upset when a white person says “nigger”] when the intention is
there….In all seriousness, I wonder about hypersensitivity and being
insensitive and if those are not two sides of the same coin and if those both
can’t get us into a significant amount of trouble. We have people in this
country whose careers have been ruined for using words that sound like “nigger”
but have no etymological link to the word nigger. [Kennedy interjects a story
about blowback after city council member laughed after using word ‘niggardly.’
Kmele continues:] And that is the hypersensitivity. I think it is indicative of
the moment we find ourselves in which is a universe in which most of the racism
we would have seen during the civil rights era has been extinguished. We do not
find that routinely anymore. And people are, in fact, manufacturing incidents
of racism on a regular basis and finding various things that outrage them,
calling it ‘racist,’ and nigger is a word that is used routinely in hip-hop
music, for example, and is ‘owned’ by that community”
[snip]
Matt:
Could it be a sign of health that a large number of people think this word is
inadvisable, it makes my ears bleed hearing it because I heard a cop growing up
in my neighborhood about how he used to haul all the [niggers] back because who’s
going to believe a [nigger]?”
Kmele:
“And that is awful, but no, I don’t think it’s a sign of health. I think it’s a
reflection of a tremendous hypocrisy that is pervasive in our society, where I
can say any number of things about race you [to Welch] simply can’t say. I can
make observations you’re not allowed to make because it might jeopardize your
career or any “good thinking person’s” sensibility”
At the
beginning of the segment, Kmele said that a lot of people are hypertensive to
perceived racism. I actually agree with this, though I think it’s wrong to be
reflexively dismissive of all claims because some people overreact. (Although,
I’m sure he counts me among them.) People have quick triggers for things that
trip their confirmation bias—whether it’s racism, or wrongdoing by the
president they oppose, or, ahem, incorrect or overwrought accusations of
racism. People who like to yap online or in other public fora often get riled
up when they see something that pushes their buttons. This does create an
environment in which you have a lot of crying ‘wolf’ when someone seems to run
too close to the line of propriety. But I think people who draw checks from Fox
News probably shouldn’t be too hard on oft-hollow, reactionary, faux outrage.
I digress.
Kmele
fears that society has become hypersensitive to racism and that people are unfairly
maligned for using words that aren’t even “etymologically related” to “nigger”
(eg, niggardly). I don’t even have to imagine a situation when someone uses a
term with tongue-in-cheek in order to skirt propriety. As a teenager, I
distinctly remember playing euchre, in which if you neglect to ‘follow suit’
you’ve committed a foul and ‘reneged.’ More than a few players would jump in
and yell “YOU RENIGGER!” knowing full well what they were saying. Etymologically
speaking, “renege” and “nigger” aren’t related at all—and I know it may be hard
to believe—but people playing cute with language don’t really give a damn about
etymology. I have no opinion whatever on the city council member who got in
trouble for using ‘niggardly,’ and maybe it was
a media-driven overreaction, but it follows the political dust-up was an effort
to glean his intent—something Kmele himself said his reaction would be based on—rather
than whether the word was Latinate or Greek based. It's a nit, I know, but let's not pretend people can't use 'niggardly' to be disrespectful and cheeky either.
Continuing
with the intent aspect, in one respect, I fully agree. As I’ve
written before, a man can use “African-American” with every bit of scorn
and resentment the utterance of “nigger” reflexively elicits. The use of “nigger”
isn’t definitive but rather a possible symptom
of racism. For good reasons, “nigger” has earned a special place in the
American (and greater Anglophone) lexicon that society has deemed generally out
of bounds for members of “outgroups”—those whom could not reasonably be construed
to be the subject of the derisive term at issue themselves. If someone of
stature or authority uses the term flagrantly and without regard to the public
rebuke one may expect from its use, an assumption of racial insensitivity should
be expected and possible animus may be inferred.
The
context of the conversation I was describing in the link above: a not-long retired
police officer I’d just met told me,
point blank, that he and his colleagues would likely rough up any “African-American,”
innocent or not, who refused an unwarranted search of his person. That he
wanted to use “nigger” until he was told of my racial background is telling:
out of misplaced respect for my heritage he wouldn’t use “nigger,” but had no
qualms telling me he’d beat me up if I were darker and refused his unconstitutional
demands. That he would assume such language and behavior would be considered at
all acceptable to me having just met me is indicative of the patent disregard
he has for black people and why it may, in fact, be important that society now checks
people who blithely use “nigger” in ‘polite’ conversation.
This, of
course, takes us to Matt’s interjection about cringing about his experience
with police treatment of blacks when he was growing up. Matt, like me, is in
the age cohort sometimes referred to as Generation X—though there are a few
years between us. We grew up in the Cold War and after the Civil Rights
Movement had petered out from its prominence in the late 1960s. We didn’t grow
up under Jim Crow and never saw the Klan inflict political violence against
black folks. Lynchings have long been a relic of the past and we can all agree
that sort of racism is, largely, behind us. But, as my friend Jamelle Bouie put it yesterday, the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t about bus seats and
drinking fountains,
it was a system of oppression that blacks in the United States had suffered
under since the nation’s inception. Police abuse was part and parcel of that
system, and we have empirical
evidence that a substantial amount of it continues to this day.
New York
City’s ‘Stop and Frisk’ program is an anti-gun measure in which police are to
invoke so-called Terry stops, named
for the decision in Terry v. Ohio 392
U.S.1 (1964), in which police officers were explicitly granted the power to “frisk”
people they “reasonably suspected” to be engaging or about to engage in
criminal behavior. This was “for the protection of [the officer] and others in
the area to conduct a carefully limited search of the outer clothing of such
persons in an attempt to discover weapons which might be used to assault him.” While
a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, a ‘frisk’ for weapons is distinct from a
full search of a suspect after arrest, but it still must be “reasonable.”
In a
footnote of that that opinion, Chief Justice Warren wrote:
“The
President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice found
that ‘in many communities, field interrogations are a major source of friction
between the police and minority groups.’ It was reported that the friction
caused by ‘misuse of field interrogations’ increases ‘as more police
departments adopt ‘aggressive patrol’ in which officers are encouraged
routinely to stop and question persons on the street who are unknown to them,
who are suspicious, or whose purpose for being abroad is not really evident.’
While frequency with which ‘frisking’ forms a part of field interrogation
practice varies tremendously with locale, and the particular officer, it cannot
help but be a severely exacerbating factor in police-community tensions. This is particularly true where the “stop
and frisk” of youths or minority group members is ‘motivated by the officers’
perceived need to maintain the power image of the beat officer, and aim
sometimes accomplished by humiliating anyone who attempts to undermine police
control of the streets.’” Terry v.
Ohio, 392 U.S. 1,(1964) fn 11, at 15, internal citations omitted, emphasis
added.
Sound
familiar? That's Civil Rights Era Supreme Court Justice talking about Civil Rights Era police procedure, abuse, and consequent marginalization of communities. Over four million stops under NYPD’s ‘Stop and Frisk’ program since 2002, a majority
of whom were young and black or Latino, and nearly 90 percent were innocent of
any crime or outstanding charge, with, according to Mayor Bloomberg himself, roughly 8,000 guns recovered—a whopping
0.2% of stops. Either the NYPD has no idea what a “reasonable” suspicion is or
they’re effectively suspending Fourth Amendment protections for black and brown
people at their whim.
Chief Justice Warren writes, “[I]t is simply fantastic
to urge that such a procedure performed in public by a policeman while the
citizen stands helpless, perhaps facing a wall with his hands raised, is a ‘petty
indignity.’ It is a serious intrusion into the sanctity of the person, which
may inflict great indignity and rouse strong resentment, and it is not to be
undertaken lightly.” (Terry, at
16-17.) I’ll get more into Terry in
another post, but Kmele’s assertion that most of the racism from the 1960s has
been “extinguished” willfully glosses over the legacy of the racism which
remains. To say we don’t find it routinely is patently absurd because, in the
NYPD and elsewhere, it IS THE ROUTINE, whether or not ‘nigger’ ever escapes the
cops’ mouths. (Even it did, who’d believe the nigger anyway?)
Asserting
that police have shed their history of exploiting and targeting blacks and
other minorities is entirely based on faith. It may or may not be true on the
whole—in fact, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say police are, on net, less
racist than they were 50 years ago—but to say it’s been effectively ‘extinguished’
has no provable basis. Beyond New York, other arrest, sentencing, and
incarceration data indicate there are racist legacies throughout the criminal
justice system all over the country. Add to this the pressure of plea bargaining, the secretive, retributive nature of policing, criminal conspiracies among cops that often target minorities, and the public reassurances by people like Kmele
that racism is so very rare, you have layers of built-in protections that can
be used against the most honest and forthright claims of racism. The aggregate criminal justice data, anecdotal evidence, and lengthy history of racism in this country--save a magical date or time at which people in authority stopped being racist I'm not aware of--doesn't support, for me anyway, 'clearly not racist' as a default position.
Given
the complications of prejudice and the human mind, and our nation’s inescapable
racial history, it’s impossible to say ‘how racist’ police or other
institutions still are in this country, but the hypocrisy lies not in whether
we are too hard on whites for ‘racial observations’ people like Kmele can make. Rather, it’s
that we allow those assertions to go unchallenged depending on what color the
person who makes them is.
Shifting
cultural norms is how civil society changes itself. That individuals lose TV
shows or suffer professional consequences when they express ideas deemed abhorrent
or anathema to what society deems appropriate is how civil society is supposed
to work. I, for one, am glad American society has gotten to the point where
racism--especially among those in authority--is talked about and condemned, instead of ignored and brushed aside as it has been since the Founding.
bellum medicamenti delenda est
***UPDATE: Kmele reached out to me to mention I should have watched the whole show before judging because they did tackle some issues, such as Stop and Frisk and Immigration. I saw the other two clips on the website, one entitled "When does a joke go too far?" which holds absolutely no interest for me, and the other "Is ObamaCare a racist term?" It turns out that was probably more a function of SEO than an adequate descriptor of the segment--as the hosts explain their (noble) reasons for dedicating a show to race. Unfortunately, for those of us unable to watch the show in its entirety, the online clip, available here, is partial and cuts off as the debate gets interesting. I'll poke around for a full cut of the show and update as appropriate.
From what (admittedly little) I've been able to watch, this seems more like good idea, bad execution, not unlike Rand Paul's Howard speech. I think the hosts, whether we agree or disagree, approached the topic in good faith. But the clips available don't paint the best picture of the crux of the debate and tackle primarily the trappings of racism instead of why it's actually a problem of public policy. -JPB
