If you look, let us say, at educational outcomes, levels of poverty, incarceration rates for people of color in the United States either you think these data reflect natural endowments of people of color (which makes you a racist asshole) or you think these data reflect unnecessary unjust social conditions. And if you think they reflect unnecessary unjust social conditions either you don't care (which makes you a racist asshole) or you do care and so engage in some measure in education, agitation, and organization to change these unnecessary unjust social conditions. And if you don't engage in any measure in education, agitation, or organization to change these unnecessary unjust social conditions then you really don't care even if you say you do (which makes you a racist asshole).
I know that when we speak of racism in contemporary life we are supposed to be quick (in the political correctness of the one who fears above all the charge of political correctness) to indicate we are talking about outcomes and structural features and vestigial legacies of a curiously abstruse racism rather than accusing particular individuals of intentional vitriolic racist sentiments.
I think this habit of ours not only overlooks widespread and fairly flagrant concrete racism in this country but it also indulges in a facile fantasy about the extent to which it is actually possible to be ignorant of or inattentive to extraordinary and abiding social violence and injustice disproportionately affecting people of color without also being outright racist in a fairly straightforward sense, a fantasy that always only benefits the racist rather than the victims of racism and hence is itself racist.
I suspect that we engage in this pretense among other reasons because we all know that part of what it usually means to be a racist asshole (or a sexist pig, or a gay basher, or a torture-apologist, or a rich prick) is also to be a self-important asshole who fancies his hurt feelings matter more than whatever hurt his clumsy belligerent ignorant self-regard causes, so everyone the least bit more sensible proceeds to let assholes be assholes in a general sort of way even as they try to nudge assholes to ameliorate their assholery the least bit in any particular egregious expression of it, because that is the only thing short of making a scene almost as unpleasant as the assholery itself that assholes allow for, being assholes.
Nevertheless, it really is worth pointing out that it happens to be inherently, absolutely, and categorically disagreeable to disagree agreeably with racist, sexist, heterosexist, or classist varieties of assholery even if precisely this, I'm sorry to say, is too often what is meant by "civility" in contemporary parlance.
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> Nevertheless, it really is worth pointing out that it happens
> to be inherently, absolutely, and categorically disagreeable
> to disagree agreeably with racist, sexist, heterosexist, or
> classist varieties of assholery even if precisely this, I'm
> sorry to say, is too often what is meant by "civility" in
> contemporary parlance.
It also means, quite often, professing to believe that incidents
such as the arrest (only a year and a half ago) of that black Harvard
professor because his key jammed in the lock when he was trying
to get into his house, and a neighbor called the cops to report
somebody trying to break in, are a thing of the past.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/harvard.html
It was amusing that President Obama later met personally with
Professor Gates to smooth ruffled feathers. The cop involved
in the incident later threatened to sue Gates for defamation
of character for calling him a "racist" in the media.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=8163051&page=1
And, of course, Gates was threatening to sue the Cambridge
police department. The animosity has since blown over,
apparently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy
That incident **begged** for a political cartoon -- which may or
may not ever have been drawn -- showing Obama being stopped
by Secret Service agents while trying to enter the White House.
"Do you have ID, sir?"
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