WHAT IS RACIST? ABUSING THE TERM

I've proposed that a racist a statement must suggest the genetic inferiority of a racial group, or the statement isn't racist. Put otherwise, a racist statement says, "We don't care about your apps or your operating system. Your collective hardware is bad. Your chips are, by nature, slower than other models." If a statement doesn't fairly suggest that sort of thing, it's not racist.

We've proceeded up the slippery slope. "They're animals, those blacks" --the test of Howard Stern's Klansman--is racist. Invoking the image of a murderous black mob, and then saying "we will take back our cities, and our culture, and our country" seems racist to me, though not to Don. (The problem is with the "we." Pronouns, as Stephen King says, are as slippery as a fly-by-night personal injury lawyer. Hey!)

There is plenty of other cross-racial invective, however, that doesn't imply a thing about genetics. Some of that invective is nasty as hell, but it still doesn't cross that line. Some of it is hateful as hell, but it still doesn't cross that line. Here is the big speech of Rev. Jeremiah Wright that had white America in an uproar:

And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. [True.] She put them on reservations. [True.] When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. [True.] When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. [True.] She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, [all true, unfortunately, even the experiments] put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness[ all true]... The government gives them the drugs [false on this one, Rev, sorry] built bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America. No, no, no, not God bless America! God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating her citizens as less than human. [True.] God damn America, as long as she pretends to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.

We're focusing here, for once, so temper your annoyance. We inquire if there is anything in that that even suggests some sort of defective white-person hardware, some genetic white-person malfunction or shortcoming. There is none. Whatever else you want to call that particular speech, you cannot call it racist. And the end, while clumsy, merely paraphrases Jefferson's sentiments on slavery: "I tremble for my Country when I reflect that God is just."

People call the guy a hater. It's so. If to recite the facts (except for the drug thing, which he should really leave out) and then point the finger and curse is hate, then that's hate. But it is remarkable that for all of the hate in that speech, there is not a shred of stuff in it you can call racist.

"Racist," in short, is a fairly useless term. It expresses a strange, archaic idea that has been pretty well marginalized for over half a century. If you want to discuss the "racist" theorizing of Wagner's opera Parsifal, which is a masterpiece concerning the racial composition of Christ's blood, if you want to discuss the opera's considerable influence on the young Adolf Hitler, if you want to discuss Adolf Hitler's theories of genetics, if you want to talk about Stern's Klansman, you'll be on solid ground. Step away from there, and the ground gets very shaky very fast.

But take heart! There is a much better word available.

Next: I solve America's racial problems and everyone rushes out and has interracial sex.