Obama, that bitch!
Remember when that John McCain supporter, a woman, asked "How do we beat the B-word?" about Hillary, and McCain and everybody in the crowd laughed? Imagine if she'd used the same kind of slur about Obama. - Salon (Joan Walsh blog), April 5, 2008
I'm feeling too tired or too charitable to insert one of my usual comments about Joan Walsh here (I did some brainstorming for it, so I suppose charitable is out). There's no racial equivalent to "bitch," is there? Simply calling a particular woman a bitch does not tar all other women by implication. Normal women (and men) will not take great offense to hear a woman they don't know described as a bitch (cf. c-word). It is not a "slur" at all, in my book, for that reason. It is a negative description whose application is typically limited to women. Such usages are harder to find for men, but they exist. "Jackass" is one.
Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, race, Salon
Call a spade a spade
Why is it acceptable to use "diplomatic" euphemisms when speaking about race in certain contexts? Two quotes from today's Wall Street Journal:
"you've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate" - Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania
"Race still matters. White working-class voters tend to be more conservative in terms of social beliefs and that is going to spill over." - Prof. John Russo, Youngstown State University
Translations:
"not ready . . ." = racist
"more conservative in terms of social beliefs" = racist
I guess the idea is that we shouldn't want to offend anyone by suggesting they are racist just because they wouldn't vote for, or date, or whatever, a black person. We'd be better off calling racism by its right name and not letting people off the hook because they're "not ready" for this and "more conservative" than that.
("So old is
this expression that it wasn't original with Plutarch, who used it back in the first century when writing about Philip of Macedon.")
Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, race, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
A little creepy, if you ask me
Here's a
kind of column that I think would never appear in a Seattle paper. Appearing on the day its missing-mother subject, Jessie Marie Davis, has been found murdered, the piece commends "people" for searching and praying for Davis instead of dwelling on the sinful side of her life. And do you know what? "This is not an endorsement of out-of-wedlock births or adultery." Congratulations too for not stoning her to death, shunning her, etc.
I'm left with the impression that I would be thoroughly creeped out to live in a place like Akron, Ohio. It doesn't help that there is a little sidebar headed "More News from Topix.net" under which the
only links are "African-American" and "Discuss African-American". There seems to be a subtext to the column, and it's not hard to see what it is when you notice that Davis is white and the father of her children (and, now, her confessed murderer) is black.
I do like the irony of a religion writer named "Terry Pluto".
Labels: local Seattle media, race, religion
"Obama isn't black."
[W]hen the handsome Obama doesn't look eastern (versus western) African, he looks like his white mother . . . . Obama isn't black.
"Black," in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. - Debra J. Dickerson, Salon, January 22, 2007
—— Dickerson argues that Obama is not black because he is not the descendant of African slaves. But I would argue that blackness -- or, more accurately, "blackness" -- is determined not by whether one is descended from slaves, but the degree to which one sees one's identity as determined by one's race. Clearly, the fact that Obama's father was African, not American, plays a role in his well-known lack of "blackness," as does the fact that his mother is white. And yet, I believe that none of this is determinative. - Gary Kamiya, Salon, January 23, 2007
Games, must we? If Obama becomes president, the story will not be about how the descendants of West-African slaves put aside . . . whatever . . . to elect the son of a transitory Kenyan immigrant and a white person. I'm sure the majority of black people in this country have ancestors who were slaves taken from West Africa (the same is true of quite a few white people). Some, a minority among American blacks, have different ancestry. It seems pointless to dwell on things like this. Obama didn't have the ideal-typical formative experiences of a black person in the United States. Who cares? We ought to only take him as an individual, not as a defective representation of some ideal type. I personally don't think all those presidents and presidential candidates
who were born with different names had ideal-typical upbringings by any stretch.
When Kamiya writes of "the degree to which one sees one's identity as determined by one's race," he
begs the question. He assumes race is something fixed. If you know your race, you can let it determine your "identity", or not. But, indisputably, race is an entirely social construction. There is no empirical basis for the categories of race in this or any other society. They are socially created. This is not to say that these categories are not "facts" in a sense, or that we can ignore them. But we should never forget that they are social fictions.
Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, race
