Feminist Looking Glass

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy (who is black) had an interesting column this week on the definition of racism.  Much of the column was focused on the remarks by Tom Tancredo at the recent Tea Party rally.  Milloy gave his opinion that the remarks were racist and that the press has not called out Tancredo for his racist remarks.  (Based on the comments to his column, Tancredo’s remarks were what most people were interested in.)

As I have written before, I also believe that Tancredo’s remarks were racist.  But what I found most interesting while reading Milloy’s column was the more general thoughts he had about the definition of racism and how to determine from the definition if a statement is racist.  Milloy wrote:

Although each of the following statements about President Obama was recently denounced as racist, only one fits the definition. Can you tell which one?

A) The United States would be “ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” (Sen. Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada, as quoted in the new book “Game Change.”)

B) “I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. . . . My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.” (Ousted Democratic governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich as quoted in the February issue of Esquire magazine.)

C) “I was trying to think about who he was tonight. And it’s interesting. He is post-racial, by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.” (Chris Matthews, host of “Hardball” on MSNBC, after watching the State of Union address in January.)

D) President Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. . . . This is our country. Let’s take it back.” (Former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), speaking at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville in February.)

Milloy concluded that “[t]he answer, of course, is D. Everything else is just a distraction. And yet, Tancredo took almost no heat for his comments, while the others were badgered into apologizing. “  He based that on his observation that “[a]ccording to Webster’s New World Dictionary, racism asserts the superiority of one race over another and seeks to implement or sustain ‘any program or practice of racial discrimination or segregation based on such beliefs.’”  (Webster’s online dictionary defines racism as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”)

I have to agree with Milloy.  Tancredo is the only one of the four to have asserted the supremacy of one race over another.  (I realize that not all people would believe that the statement even concerns any differences between races, let alone asserts superiority, but, since literacy tests have historically been viewed as a means of discriminating against blacks, I think it is clear that Tancredo was asserting superiority.)  The other three acknowledged race, but clearly were not asserting any superiority of one race over another.

Milloy made a large mistake in his thoughts about the recent comments by John Mayer.  But I’ll leave that aside.  Addressing himself to his fellow blacks, Milloy said:

A distinction needs to be made between words that rub some black people the wrong way and those meant to do us harm. . . .  When everybody is labeled a racist, then nobody is a racist. When we habitually cry wolf, we risk not being able to recognize one when it actually shows up.

Milloy certainly is making the issue too simple.  After all, even if there is no explicit assertion of superiority, there can still be the implication.  It is seldom easy to know the intent of a statement.  And stereotyping can certainly occur without an assertion of superiority.  However, by considering the definition of racism—in particular the part about superiority—when deciding whether a statement is racist, it can help avoid jumping to conclusions and, as Milloy says, “crying wolf.”  I am not aware of any history of racism from Harry Reid, Rod Blagojevich, or Chris Matthews.  Their statements had no assertion of superiority of one race over another.  There is no reason for the press to have “badgered them into apologizing.”

And, finally, how would the definition of racism apply to Milloy’s column?  Predictably, one commenter called Milloy a racist because of what he said about Tancredo.  But, clearly, Milloy made no assertion of superiority of one race over another.  As Milloy said, the charge of racism from the commenter is “just a distraction.”

Filed under: Race/Ethnicity Tagged: | chris matthews, Courtland Milloy, Harry Reid, racism, Tom Tancredo