"I am cursed with the responsibility gene,'' Ms. Clinton told the New York Times in an interview upon returning from Iraq last week.I mean, Clinton can't very well suggest that Obama lacks the "responsibility gene," can she? I'm pretty sure that's not what she was doing (or had any intention of doing), but now that we have the first credible African-American and female presidential candidates in American history running, I think we're going to learn that many of the common formulations we use to talk about ourselves and our politics can sound tin-eared at best -- and downright offensive, at worst -- when discussing African-American or female subjects. I mean, Biden might very well have meant "clean" in the sense of not having been embroiled in any political or personal scandals (such as "squeaky-clean" Harold Ford has had to deal with when it comes to his "dirty family politics," to quote from a Salon article), but it just sounded wrong in this context, as if Biden were working off the implicit assumption that African-Americans are normally dirty -- and "dirty" is the first half of one of the more vicious insult formulations Americans can launch at each other.
The issue isn't just Biden being an insensitive boob, but rather that commonly used words and phrases activate different frames -- remember that whole discussion? -- in different contexts, and that women and African-Americans live in a verbally constraining soup of negative frames. This is an issue we've repeatedly grappled with internally when, for example, trying to write headlines about female story subjects and politicians, because so many of the most basic ways of describing people have been ruined in the female context by the laddie mags and porn industry (i.e., an article about the women who were held in Abu Ghraib couldn't very well be called "The Women of Abu Ghraib," because that formulation was claimed years ago by Playboy magazine). In any event, I suspect we will be seeing a lot more of this kind of American mishigas in the months ahead as people stumble into a whole set of frames they are not used to thinking about. This is going to seriously damage some public figures, such as Biden. But, overall, I think that it will be a healthy process for American society to undergo, and that we are going to learn an unusual amount about ourselves, as well as about the candidates seeking to lead us.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
