Jon Chait has a new piece up at TNR about Rush Limbaugh, riffing off of Conor Friedersdorf’s piece which I criticized for being more concerned with curtailing accusations of racism than actual racism.
An accusation of racism is a tricky thing. No consensus exists as to what actually constitutes racism anyway. Is it a hatred for all minorities? Opposition to formal legal equality? Support for public policies that have disparate racial impacts? Debates over whether so-and-so is racist usually boil down to the accuser and the accused having different definitions of the term.
This is true even of indisputable racists. Last fall, a local Republican group in California sent out a newsletter with a fake Obama dollar bill, labeled “food stamps” and decorated with fried chicken and watermelon. The group’s president denied being a racist and, in her defense, pointed out that she had once supported Alan Keyes for president. A few weeks ago, Georgia restaurant owner Patrick Lanzo displayed a roadside sign reading, OBAMAS [sic] PLAN FOR HEALTH CARE: NIGGER RIG IT. Lanzo insisted, according to a news report, that “he’s not a racist.” More recently, Louisiana justice of the peace Keith Bardwell refused to marry an interracial couple. “I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell argued, “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom.” You heard the man: These are such close black friends he allows them to use his bathroom.
So whether Limbaugh is “racist” is a near-meaningless question. Suffice it to say that he’s intensely race-conscious and constantly plays upon white racial paranoia.
This gives racists an opt-out clause–something Friedersdorf offered Limbaugh after giving a fairly comprehensive list of some of his nastier racial commentary. Chait undermines his own argument–some people are “indisputably racist” but whether or not they are racist is “meaningless” because they deny this is so. It’s not meaningless–we’ve just entered a new stage in American history where even racists think racism is “bad,” which is why they couldn’t possibly be racist. I do think it’s often “meaningless” to dispute whether a person is racist–in most cases, this unfairly makes a person the sum of ugly impulses all Americans, to some degree, ultimately share–but whether actions themselves are racist. And Rush Limbaugh’s insistence on comparing black professional athletes to gang members is both racist and the kind of thing that would disqualify you from being a big part of an organization made up largely of black professional athletes.
At any rate, like Friedersdorf, Chait ultimately seems more concerned with reducing frivolous accusations of racism than dealing with racism itself, which is “tricky.” Certainly frivolous accusations of racism are a problem–but ultimately Chait, like Friedersdorf, mostly takes issue with Limbaugh’s launching of such accusations against his ideological adversaries:
When I attended college just after the height of the political-correctness fad, I was exposed to the exotic but widely accepted theory that racial minorities could not, by definition, be guilty of racism. Limbaugh has formulated a sort of mirror-image philosophy: Conservatives can’t be racist. “Racism in this country,” he has announced, “is the exclusive province of the left.”
The victimology of the leftist is bad enough–he is beset by racism. But the persecution complex of the conservative has managed to top that. The conservative is a double victim–of false accusations of racism and of racism itself. Limbaugh moans, “Frankly, the biggest problem I face in the current climate of political correctness is that I’m color-blind about it.” Poor Limbaugh–he tries so hard to avoid race, but it just keeps finding him.
Chait, as always, is a pleasure to read. But this perpetuates the–if you’ll pardon the use of the phrase–“If you smelt, it, you dealt it” philosophy of dealing with race that sees accusations of racism as more problematic than racism itself. It’s unclear to me how racism should be dealt with without openly identifying it–like I’ve said in the past, I think the social sanctions for expressing certain kinds of racism based in ignorance, rather than malice–are entirely too high considering their prevalance. But that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t call it like it is–which, in several examples above, Chait does, despite how “tricky” it initially appears. What is really “tricky” about racism isn’t that there are readily identifiable bigots–it’s that all Americans occasionally indulge their prejudiced impulses–but that it’s impossible to have a conversation about that because we think of racism as something that only afflicts the truly depraved.
— A. Serwer
