Not That There's Anything Wrong With That...

The Michael Richards racism scandal has pretty much its course during the past 24 hour news cycle. Everyone's heard about it, seen that video and moved on with their lives. I'll admit, it gets less and less shocking each time you watch it. The first time, you're like, "Whoa, Kramer's a psycho." But you rewatch it and it starts to look like a very angry, desperate man trying to say the single most insulting think he can think of, hoping for a reaction, which then spirals out of control.

I'm bringing it up again only because John Derbyshire at the National Review has an initially interesting yet ass-backwards theory about the whole debacle.

The n-word rant by Michael Richards ("Kramer" in the Seinfeld show) was freaky enough in its own way, but it is the reporting and commenting on it that is more revealing of our current collective state of mind. I just note in passing the following two points:

(1) The language in which we discuss these things is as ritual and formulaic as a Papal anathema**. Richards didn't say, speak, or utter the offending words, he spewed them. Those words weren't insults or crudities, they were epithets. (I discovered by chance a year or so ago that my son believed "epithet" to be a synonym for the n-word.) People didn't find them obnoxious, annoying, outrageous, or insulting, but repugnant ... Etc., etc. You could program a computer to come up with commentary on events like this.

Okay, nothing too shocking here, although his first "point" is pretty thin. I'd say all the words he goofs on here are pretty appropriate to the situation. (I myself used one or two...) Screeching "nigger" to a crowd of people who have come to see a comedy show is, in fact, repugnant. Rejecting the word "repugnant" to describe a loud, hostile racist screed is like rejecting "Pasta Primavera" as a title for a zesty Italian noodle dish. Sure, I could have used other words, but why?

And "nigger" is a racial epithet. That's just a well-chosen noun. To call it a "crudity" is less accurate. Nigger has fallen out of use because it is a racial slur, not a dirty word. If he had called everyone "felching assgobblers" or "cockfucklers," that would have been crudity.

As for his final insult, mean to degrade all commentators who are not so wise and careful as The Derb in their assessments of pop culture moments, I suppose you probably could program a computer to concoct generic statements in response to racist outbursts. So what? You could also program a computer to concoct generic NRO columns.

STOP STARING AT MY MAN-BOOBS! [Jonah Goldberg]
Everything Bush does makes sense; you're just not high-level enough to understand it. He reminds me of a miracle baby created in a lab by combining the DNA of Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Jesus and a massive, bloodthirsty grizzly bear. Only more manly.

See? How hard was that?

Here's the part where John's argument actually started to make sense, causing me to panic and dial 9-1-1, certain I was having a stroke:

(2) There is much discussion about Richards' essential nature—is he or isn't he a racist? This is supposed to be a binary attribute, like being Armenian, homosexual, or club-footed: you either are, or you aren't, a racist. That seems to me all wrong. Every normal person harbors some identification with his race, as he does with his family, his nation, his mother-language group, his bowling league, etc. Group identification is a perfectly ordinary facet of human nature—though, like others, more intensely felt in some, less so in others, and possibly absent in a very few.

You know what? He's absolutely 100% right. (Well, okay, 95% right. I don't think being a homosexual is necessarily a binary attribute. Lots of people are somewhere in the undecided center on that issue. Actually, being Armenian isn't a black-or-white clear-cut proposition either. What if you're 1/2 Armenian? Or 1/4? So, fuck his analogies, but the rest is right.)

I'm just as guilty as anyone on this count. I commonly label people "racists" based on their behavior and/or language towards minorities, but this isn't entirely accurate. Most people are not strict "racists" or "non-racists." It's just a bunch of people who are at different points on a Tolerance Spectrum. When I call them "racists," I do not mean it as a 100% fool-proof, always accurate barometer of their attitudes towards every group of people. I just mean people like Michael Richards, Mel Gibson and John Derbyshire fall far more towards the Intolerant Asshat end of the spectrum than I feel is acceptable for a modern human being.

(Check out the handy euphamism "group identification." Like all insidiously perfect euphamisms, it takes something negative and turns it into a positive. You're not a terrified racist or xenophobe - you just really really love your own group! White Power Pride!)

Of course, as with other innate qualities—the urge to help oneself to other people's property, or to be intimate with attractive members of the opposite sex—this one is, among civilized people, circumscribed with rules and restraints. Under the system of manners prevailing in current American society, white people may express feelings about their whiteness, or about other folks' non-whiteness, only under a few extremely restricted circumstances, and are in fact taught from an early age to feel that white group identity is an unsavory and antisocial matter. (Non-white people have considerably more latitude in expressing their group identities. Try googling "association of black..." and see how many hits you get. Now change "black" to "white.")

And, just like that, we go completely off the fucking cliff.

Referring to racial sensitivity as manners strikes me as inappropriate. Not acting out on your deeply-felt bigotry isn't just proper etiquette, like eating your salad with the tiny fork or pulling out a chair for a lady. It's your duty as an American citizen to treat everyone else with dignity and respect. You have to, whether you like it or not.

Also, I hate this goddamn idiotic "white people aren't allowed to express their whiteness" nonsense. People have even left this stuff in comments on my blog posts before. "How come every culture gets to celebrate its traditions and heritage and white people don't...Minorities have it so good in this country...I want to start a Christian Club at my school..."

See, the thing is, white people don't need special secret groups to celebrate their Caucasiocity. This entire nation is a celebration of whiteness. Every day is National White Motherfucker Awareness Day!

There is definitely an Association of White Businessmen, Derb! It's called Every Fucking Industry in America! Jesus Christ, you want a group photo? Take a look at a list of the richest CEO's sometime. There's no way John Derbyshire is this dumb. He's just making up this bullshit to boost the spirits of his readers, whom he obviously knows via state-of-the-art demographic-focused market research are bitter, elderly white people upset that the Negro is taking over this country with his jive talking and his inflatable sneakers.

This nonsense about a lack of whtie group identity. Aren't we all sick of this idiocy by now?

I think white people have fully expressed an open desire to stick together and protect their own, thank you very much. Been to Central Orange County lately? Go to any major street in Irvine during the Power Walking Hour on any Saturday and you'll think you've stumbled into the Pale Whitey Pride Parade. Why do you think black people had to make up their own professional associations? Because they had nothing better to do with their evenings? It was so they could band together to try and get a toehold in a white-dominated society. THIS IS SO FUCKING OBVIOUS!

Michael Richards committed a gross breach of those customary rules and restraints—a severe etiquette malfunction, just as much as it he'd started fondling a female audience member. The inner Kramer—the one kept in rein by all those internalized restraints that make civilized life tolerable—just broke out for a moment. To assert that this proves him to be different from you and me in some fundamental, essential way—he is a "racist" and I am not—is just an absurd kind of moral preening. Richards may be a bit shorter on self-control than you or me (and that's deplorable enough, in a highly-paid stage performer)... but that's a continuous variable, too, not a binary quality.

Wow, there's so much pigshit ignorant stuff up there, I could write 20 blog posts and not pick through it. The guy's a marvel of modern bigotry. If only there were a Nobel Prize in the subject, he'd be on the shortlist...

Let's start with severe etiquette malfunction. Um, no. In fact, I never want to hear Democrats or liberals tarred with the "politically correct" label again after this. Calling an act like Michael Richard's a "severe etiquette malfunction" is way more silly than calling a mailman a mail carrier or changing the spelling of women to "womyn." Way more silly. I'd think he's trying to make fun of the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" line, but John Derbyshire's doesn't typically reference pop culture more recent than Safety Last.

As I said above, this has nothing to do with being polite. The Derb intimates that if you got up on a stage and heard a few black guys heckling you, any reasonable person would think, "Hey, I should totally yell out to everyone here that these guys are niggers" and then catch themselves. That, of course, is ridiculous. These men attempted to irritate Richards, possibly even tried to ruin his stand-up performance. That's rude. Insulting them repeatedly in front of a room full of people on the basis of their race is not rude, it is disgusting. (Why? To call someone a tardpuss is to have a laugh at their expense. To call someone an asshole is to insult them. To call a black person a nigger is to demean that person. All are inappropriate, but isn't calling them all equally upsetting just moral relativism?)

I also disagree with Derbyshire that it's similar to molesting a woman. Each situation robs the victim of their dignity, but in the case of the woman, the violation is more flagrant because of the physical and invasive nature of the attack. Richards' insulted these guys, but did not assault them. But the fact that his prevailing argument centers on personal restraint - that in a consequence-free world, most people would respond like Richards, but hold back to maintain a certain level of decorum - makes this a puzzling metaphor. Is he likewise implying that most men would molest women in front of a room full of people, were they not so well-mannered?

Then, as if he hadn't done enough already, he compares the vile, invective-spewing Richards performance to the Kramer character from "Seinfeld," saying Richards' "inner Kramer" came flying out. Ridiculous. Kramer said whatever was on his mind, true, but he was an open-minded and easy-going guy. There were rarely black people on "Seinfeld," so it's hard to say if he would have thought to call anyone a nigger, but I kind of doubt it. Should one's inner Kramer come out, they'd unlikely engage in loud shouting matches over lynching jokes. More likely, they'd be sharing some fine Dominican cigars with Japanese tourists, possibly while enjoying fresh plantains and collaborating on a coffee table book about coffee tables.

Derbyshire apparentlky thinks posts like mine of the other day, in which I chided Richards for his "racism," was just so much self-aggrandizement, elevating myself because I would never speak aloud that which Richards dared to mention.

I think he's about 1/3 right. I agree that there's no such thing as a pure "racist" vs. a pure "non-racist." It's unfair to say Richards is solidly in one category and I am in another. There have been times in my life when I have harbored unkind thoughts about other races.

I will be perfectly honest: A roommate (who will remain nameless) and I, while living in a very noisy Los Angeles apartment complex, came to refer to all loud Latinos in our immediate area using the moniker "Fernando Beans." For example, if a small child whom we believed to be Mexican happened to be sitting on the stairs loudly bawling, we might say, "Sounds like Fernando Beans is having a bad morning." Sometimes, we might even take it to the next logical step - "Sounds like we should get Fernando some more beans."

This is racist. I apologize to anyone who is offended. Obviously, it's a variation on the racial epithet "beaner" referring to a Mexican, with the added insult of directly implying that Mexicans eat an inordinate amount of beans or rely on beans for proper nutrition, or even prefer beans to any and all other foods. You see what I'm saying.

I mention it not to insult anyone but to point out that I recognize Derbyshire's overall point. We all have the capacity for racism, whether or not we openly act upon it in daily life.

However, he glosses the most important facet of this entire case. He argues that we are wrong to castigate Richards for his racism because we all sometimes harbor racist thoughts or feelings. But Richards is not in trouble for having racist feelings, and that is not why I or anyone else derided him in print. He's in trouble because he maniacally insulted a crowd of people who had paid to see him perform stand-up comedy. And he did so in such a passionate and emotional way as to imply that these outrageous statements reflected his actual feelings and perspectives about race relations.

(Also, I mocked him largely for his response to the matter, which was cryptic and convoluted.)

The comparison would be if I found myself bombing at stand-up comedy in front of a largely Latin crowd. I've bombed in front of a few audiences, so this could theoretically have happened. It's extremely unlikely I would have done my best 2 minutes on Fernando Beans. In fact, I wouldn't. No matter how badly I was doing. I'd probably fall back on more jokes about going bald or being a Jew or being a fat bald Jew. Those seemed to go over well.

The only difference between my jokes about Fernando Beans and Richards' jokes about sticking forks in the asses of black hecklers is the degree of hostility, granted. I don't feel hatred towards Mexicans. I just kind of felt frustrated with my neighbors sometimes and making up a silly, albeit racist, name for them made me feel better. The difference in our behavior and attitude could not be more clear, I think. (I hope!) And that's why I feel justified in condemning his actions. I do not think anyone should be censored or prohibited from speaking their mind, but I reserve my right to be repulsed by what I hear.