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NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You go, Garance. That "maidenly vapors" line surely got my back up. Brother Pierce apparently fails to see a connection between expressions of hatred toward women and violence against women. Perhaps an intervention is in order. I do, however, second the sentiments of Brother Pierce on the Seinfeld phenomenon and the fallout from the Michael Richards racist rant. Call me a delicate flower, but I never got into Seinfeld because it was just too mean. (Pierce put his finger on the undercurrent of prejudices flowing through the show, though he neglected to mention the fear of queers that also ran through it.) I just watched the bit posted on TMZ from Richards' satellite appearance last night on Letterman, which, speaking of undercurrents, proves one more time the old adage about de Nile not just being a river in Egypt. Here's Richards:
I push the envelope I do a lot of free association on stage� I don't know. In view of the situation and the act going where it was going, I don't know -- the rage did go all over the place; it went to everybody in the room.Talk about compartmentalization! It "fires out of me," but it's not part of me. Why don't we stop having stupid arguments about whether saying something racist makes you a racist? If you're white in America, you're probably at least racially prejudiced even if you never say anything racist. You'd have to have been raised in a bubble not to be. (Yes, you can tell me that most black people are, too, but don't try to draw a moral equivalency between their prejudice and mine. My foremothers weren't raped by black men who claimed to own them and, in the words of Michael Richards, no one ever tried to hang me, or any of my ancestors, upside down with a [expletive] fork up my ass for the crime of being white.) As David B. Cole, an African-American friend in the entertainment biz -- and a brilliant musician at that -- asserts, every single person in the United States is mentally ill because of the legacy of slavery. (And that legacy is about race and sex. Can I get a witness?) Denial, self-esteem issues, trauma, guilt -- it's all right there. And there's not a one of us who doesn't feel it. Pick your poison. [text updated]I know people could, blacks could feel -- I'm not a racist, that's what's so insane about this. I don't -- and yet it's said, it comes through, it fires out of me.
--Adele M. Stan
