You Just Need To Walk Away...

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Last night, I read on Ed Morrissey's blog :

"I wasn't aware that "articulate" constituted some sort of racist smear, but apparently Oliver Willis writes his weblog to set us all straight. When I wrote that Michael Steele, Maryland's lieutenant governor, had that particular quality, it must have made Oliver rather angry. Paying a compliment to an African-American in his mind means that one assumes the rest of the population lacks the quality noted in the one."

What Ed actually said was: "Articulate, knowledgeable, passionate, and humorous, he [Steele] embodies the communication skills of a Ronald Reagan with a keen grasp of policy."

You are such a racist Ed! How could you speak like that about an African American person?! Can you not be more sensitive and say: "Inarticulate, stupid, dispassionate, and devoid of any sense of humor, he embodies the communication skills of a Richard Nixon with a keen grasp of policy."

Can we all just agree to compliment Oliver Willis by declaring that he is in no way articulate.

I apologize in advance for any racial slurs I may have inadvertantly uttered, such as the word 'racist' for example, I should have used the word 'potato' instead, much more appropriate. Don't you think, yes, much more appropriate and less racially explosive...although no, there is the digging of the potatoes in the South....yes that could be a racial slur.

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Jeff Goldstein picks the story up and flies with it, nails and all, serving it straight to Oliver  Willis, pure 'intentionalism and interpretation', according to Glenn Reynolds:

"As someone who is invested in language and the dissemination of meaning - and in particular, as someone who’s been long engaged in a meta-analyses that proceeds from the thesis that how we believe language functions has practical, real-world consequences, in that our structural understanding of what constitutes a valid interpretation will necessarily find its way into policy and law and legal precedent - I find scratch’s comment absolutely chilling.

Because what he is arguing here is that, no matter what Ed meant by “articulate” (presumably, Ed intended it to mean just that, articulate, “characterized by the use of clear, expressive language") - as a signifier, the mark comes so pre-loaded with baggage that it would have behooved Ed simply to choose another word, and in so doing, to tacitly surrender that particular word to people like Oliver who have laid claim to it. White Republicans can no longer deploy the grapheme “articulate” to describe a Black person, else they are open to charges of racism, given that this particular grapheme has, in the past, been imbued with signification that, in Ed’s case, he didn’t intend.

Sadly, “scratch” offers a pragmatic response to a postmodern linguistic problem that arrives as the direct result of interpretation having been severed from the moorings of original intent and turned over to the receiver.  And Oliver’s response is indicative of what happens when the ground of interpretation is surrendered to the kind of motivated relativism that results from such a linguistic perversion."

My very 'articulate' and reader Kenny has this take on my post, which he started as a comment below, and as it got out of hand in length decided to post it in two posts on his site. The second one, which he prefers is here. This man is such a genius, I love reading his comments every time. He starts the first one of the two:

"I had ignored the minor flap over Oliver Willis's painfully childish, malicious, and outright dumb attack on Captain Ed, because...well, what exactly do you expect from Oliver? I haven't wasted time on the poor guy's site in a long, long time. But then some of the discussion over at All Things Beautiful triggered a train of thought:....."

The subject is so ludicrous perhaps it is not even worth debating, well, maybe just a little perhaps... Articulate means racist? Really. Poor Oliver is  just trying to drum up traffic ....and we are all taking him seriously....
Guys you just need to walk away....

"Thus every blogger, in his kind,
is bit by him who comes behind ..." Ed Morrissey

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Let's step back a bit, shall we.

In fact let's step back 48 years exactly to the day, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent United States National Guard troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce desegregation. And let's remember the headlines describing the events of the next day on September 25, 1957:  "More than 1,000 paratroopers in full battle dress escort nine black children to high school in Little Rock, Arkansas."

In this context, I'd say it's a proud achievement that we can nearly 50 years later squabble as to whether the modifier "articulate" is 'loaded' if applied to any member of the African-American community.

May I also add another perspective: Let's for argument's sake accept that the modifier "articulate" is in fact loaded in the prescribed way. Surely, this too refers to an era past; an era during which it took 1,000 paratroops to escort nine black children to high school!

Therefore, Oliver Willis' 'polite' recommendation to Captain Ed not to use said modifier is somewhat outdated; just as outdated as if he tried to conjure up urgent activism on the basis of the events on September 25,1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas.

To spell it out: It's at best untidy thinking to insist on dragging along outdated meaning to present time uses (especially as Oliver Willis admits that the meaning is part of 'American history') and then to go on ahead and base an accusation of racial impropriety on same. I call it disingenuous in the extreme.

But then perhaps he is channeling Rev.Al Sharpton...and simply drumming up traffic for his site......

More and much more in the comments below. Enter at your own risk. LOL

Comments

[jess1dering]

I spoke at length to a young white male college student a few weeks ago. I am still troubled by our conversation. He, in essence, told me that he believes that all white people have a pathology that is negative and destructive and that we WILL as a race, pay for it. He told me that the pathology causes us to go to other peoples countries and conquer and oppress those people. I had thought that we were probably called to explore by some inate curiosity and desire for adventure and exploring the unknown. Apparently, our motives were much more sinister than that? At any rate, my friend told me he would bring me some very interesting material, that would wake me up to reality, that he had gotten at school. I guess I'll look forward to it. Except that my friend seemed militantly and completely sold on his ideas. It's difficult discussing things with someone who feels passionately correct about an issue because they have a tendency , without meaning to , to hurt ones' feelings sometimes, eg. by calling me someone with a pathological mental illness that enjoys oppressing and depriving other human beings of realizing their full potential. OUCH. THAT did hurt my feelings.

[Stefan]

The point you are making here Jess is one that I agree with emphatically and that I have made very often. There are many liberals that really just want to help people and feel this very deeply so they are attracted to the Democratic party because they too believe it is the party that is “for” black people. Those well intentioned people aside, the intellectual Left has a smug and condescending attitude towards racial minorities in general. The great white liberal will stoop down and pick up the suffering, oppressed black people and cradle them in his compassionate and benevolent hands because without his help they are doomed to live in squalor. This is nauseating and racist. They end up trapping people in a cycle of dependency that binds them to the Democratic. Even those blacks who are not poor (which by the way is 75% of them and have risen to the middle class on their own, just like every other nationality, in spite of the welfare culture) have been convinced that as a people they are still oppressed and that the Democrats are the salvation for their brethren. The liberals project this self righteousness on the world stage as well. All problems in the world are caused by, guess who, white people!! They think so poorly of Africans as to deny them the ability to commit evil acts on their own. Dictators are just “puppets” of the US incapable of their own cruelty. It might seem strange to imply that to deny ones ability to be evil is de-humanizing but it is absolutely true. Animals are not evil because they act at an instinctual level and we don’t expect much else from them sometimes. Humans are the only creatures on this earth that can be “evil”. So to understand that we are all (black, white, etc.) human beings who have been given free will then we must accept that we can all do evil. In the same way we can decide to stay in our homes when we have been warned of an impending hurricane.

[jess1dering]

The thing that struck me in reading Aimee's letter was the the very, very fine thread , almost gossimer fine, that held the whole fabric together. It was the assumption that the left was responsible for fixing the problems FOR black americans. This belief is proof perfect that Aimee believes that black people are inferior to her. That they can not solve their own problems, that they must depend on the noble left, that the ideal will become reality only if the issue is handled carefully enough by the Left. Here are Aimee's own words. " I propose that we need to be extremely careful and tactical about how we do go about addressing those issues, if we ever want the ideal to become the reality. And I do agree with you that they need to remain at the forefront of the discussion." The tragedy for many black people is that they are believing this lie. Because of that , they do not tap into their own resourcefulness, creativity, energy, etc. It took my breath away to read statements made by the family of a victim of Hurricane Katrina. It went like this; every one in the family tried to get Dad to evacuate with all the others. His wife and his grown son could not convince him. He had ridden out other hurricanes. So the family left him there. The picture in the paper that alerted his family to his condition was of Dad being held by a white rescue worker out side on the families front porch. They got him to a hospital, where the family got to be with him for a time before he died. He never regained consciousness but they were all with him to say their goodbyes. NOW, this is what the son who couldn't make Dad leave home had to say, brace yourself , Bush should have physically forced people to evacuate. Isn't that sad ? Dad was a grown man who made a bad call, but it was his decision to make. That's a dignity issue isn't it ? So sad that any black person would believe the lie that someone ELSE is responsible for their adult decisions. Or that they NEED anyone else to be responsible for them in any " special " way.

[Alexandra]

How many more words are going to be hijacked from this rich language of ours, and proclaimed as 'offensive' or 'racist'? Are we really going to be reduced to descriptive words such as 'cool' and 'like yeah man'?
You know, I really always try to be as liberal in my conservative thinking as I can, but I just feel that something needs to be done to turn America around and change course towards some good old fashioned family values and faith in US. And I don't mean U.S. I mean capital US, as in WE. Politics has made us all so bitter and twisted, with zero tolerance and irrevocably judgmental, it really is impossible anymore to have a decent conversation between two people with opposing political views, without the soundbites and insults and accusations of racism and prejudice... Yes it is sad. Compliments are only possible if you belong to the same political party, if not they are considered insults!

[Darren]

So complimenting people is now off limits? Sad.

[Kenny Pierce]

I agree, I love the comment section on this blog, because pretty much everybody involved takes the time to try to make themselves clear, and everybody involved seems genuinely to try to understand what the other people are saying rather than to score cheap debating points.

[North by Northwest]

Kenny,

I for one very much enjoy your thorough comments in general and in relation to this issue in particular!! It seems to me, that a lot of misunderstandings could easily be avoided if one cared to outline one's position in a little more detail; talking to rather than at each other! Exchanging soundbites rather than making thought through arguments is all too often the root cause for stubbornly persisting ignorance. That's the ill of so many blogs with their corresponding comment sections.

[Alexandra]

That certain Redneck Kenny is getting fan mail!!!! I have been getting e-mails to tell me that my blog is great and my 'Kenny Comments' section even better!!!! So now I am thinking, should I start the 'Kenny Comments' section, with it's own bandwidth? LOL

[Kenny Pierce]

Just passing on a Mark Steyn bit about all the knee-jerk reaction of how the plight of the Ninth Ward black showed America's "racism" (passing it on for comic effect, not as a real argument or anything):

"To those who would criticise, where the hell were you?" [Mayor Nagin] roared the other day. "Where the hell were you?" In a town you're not the mayor of, happily. ... Charges of Republican "racism" rang particularly hollow in the context of New Orleans, where sodden blacks might be better advised to ponder what they have to show for being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party for four decades.

[Kenny Pierce]

NxN,

>
What do you think is the position of her parents, and I don't mean 'her parents' literally?
>

Oh, I don't really know; but just the fact that her parents have a good twenty years' more experience than she does -- and have been around her for her whole life, while she's probably been around for only about half of theirs -- makes it more likely than not that, on any particular subject, they understand her position better than she understands theirs. I don't know whether they have the racism thing right or not; but her letter is the letter of somebody who doesn't take seriously the possibility that her parents are right and she's wrong. I was more interested in the unconscious immaturity of mind she betrayed than in the actual issue -- and I'm not really slamming her that much because we were all (most of us at least) in college ourselves, back in the day, and we all have gone through the stage of being impressed with how much smarter and wiser and more enlightened we are than are our parents. (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi I think: "When I was twelve, my father was the stupidest man alive. But when I turned twenty-one, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in those nine years." Something like that, anyway.)

>
I am interested to know - and I should immediately admit, that the reason is, that I do not know - which "assumptions about race" you are referring to and how they may have contributed to the plight of the poor urban blacks on New Orleans
>

A quick caveat: by "the left" in what follows I mean "most people I know who sound like Aimee," which is to say, the unthinking left of academia, undergraduate conversation, and newspaper op-ed pages. Again, if you sit down with somebody who talks like this in public, and you have a real conversation with them in private, their apparent IQ often rises rapidly.

By far the biggest assumption is a simple variation on the good old-fashioned fallacy of the confusion of correlation with cause: if a particular set of blessings is disproportionately lacking in persons of a particular ethnicity, then that is prima facie evidence that they are victims of racism. To put it another way, the left assumes that if we could get rid of white racism, you would see no disparity between black people in the aggregate and white people in the aggregate.

There's the confusion between generalizations and stereotypes, and the left's axiom that if you act on a negative generalization about people of a particular race, that is per se racist and immoral -- but only if the race about whom you are generalizing is "historically oppressed," as the left freely slings around negative generalizations about white people at the drop of a hat. (That assumption inspired me to post what Alexandra has rather cheekily called The Longest Post in the History of the Blogosphere.) Thus Aimee's parents' locking the door in black neighborhoods is seen by her not as rational behavior, but as "racism," even though nine out of ten black people would also lock their doors in the same neighborhood and for exactly the same reasons -- namely, that crime rates are abnormally high in largely black neighborhoods. I would bet good money that I could quietly steer the conversation along to a point where, fifteen minutes after Aimee had adduced that behavior as evidence of her parents' "unconscious racism," she was adducing, as evidence of our society's "systemic racism," the fact that black people who live in largely black neighborhoods are disporportionately victims of crime...and it would never cross her mind that this fact might have anything to do with, much less provide any justification for, her parents' behavior.

The unthinking left tends to assume that it is useful and effective to apply the term "racism" to behavior that involves no malice whatsoever, which is a highly questionable linguistic strategy whether from the standpoint of clarity of thought, from the standpoint of charitableness of temperament, or from the standpoint of persuasiveness of rhetoric. Though I optimistically note that Aimee seems to be groping toward comprehension of the possibility that this assumption is one that should be abandoned.

That's a couple of the common assumptions that sort of leaped out at me from Aimee's letter. You could probably dig out more if you wanted to bother, but this is a comment on Alexandra's blog, not a post on my own; so believe or not I'm actually trying to control the length of the thing.

As far as how these assumptions contribute to the plight of urban blacks: if you misidentify problems, then you do not find solutions; in fact you very frequently apply "solutions" that actually make the problem worse. Hurricane Katrina exposed severe problems within inner-city New Orleans. Those problems have been there for years. They are problems very similar to the problems of Detroit and Washington, D.C., and the fact that these heavily black cities are such terrible places to live is seen as evidence of racism by most of my liberal friends. But it seems to me (though I admit I haven't researched it very hard and could be wrong about this) that the single biggest problem of all three cities is an abysmally bad city government that is dominated precisely by the black political establishment. 15% of the NOPD, for example, got going (in the bad sense) as soon as the going got tough, in stark contrast to the NYPD. Washington D.C. reelected a mayor that everybody had seen on videotape cavorting with a crack whore. Detroit's schools are a sick joke; the adult illiteracy rate is between 45% and 50%; literally thousands of black parents are desperately trying to get their kids into charter schools -- and the black city government is trying to head those parents off at the pass. (Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been one of the leading obstructionists -- even though his own children attend a charter school.)

But those city governments were all democratically elected, and the mayors of all three cities are (I believe) black, as is the new acting police chief of New Orleans, the recently hastily departed police chief of New Orleans, and the police chief of New Orleans before him (though I hasten to add that the last gentleman seems to have done a lot to clean up what was, before he got there, a really corrupt police department). At the very least, something more complicated is going on to make life miserable for the black people in those cities than simply the fact that white rednecks in Oklahoma don't like black people.

If (a) your only, or even your primary, solution to the problems of black people is to make white people stop being racist, but (b) black people have serious problems that aren't caused by white racism, then if the black folks have to depend on you for solutions to their problems, they are well and truly shafted. Which I think is exactly what urban blacks are, if they look to the unthinking left (or, of course, to the unthinking right, which has its own assumptions) for solutions to their problems.

I think I just committed The Longest Comment in the History of the Blogosphere. Perhaps we should leave others to worry about the problem of race and poverty in New Orleans, and address ourselves to solving the problem of undue verbosity on the part of a certain redneck who shall remain nameless...

[north by northwest]

Kenny,

"Still, my guess is that Aimee's parents understand her position quite a bit better than she understands theirs, despite her naively placid air of superiority to them. [...] ...that her parents actually have it right..."

What do you think is the position of her parents, and I don't mean 'her parents' literally?

"Yet in fact the left has a very sizable set of highly questionable, [...] assumptions about race, several of which are on display in Aimee's letter, and many of which arguably contributed much more significantly to the plight of the poor urban blacks of New Orleans [...] and the odds that Aimee would be interested in having those prejudices exposed are [...] pretty low..."

I am interested to know - and I should immediately admit, that the reason is, that I do not know - which "assumptions about race" you are referring to and how they may have contributed to the plight of the poor urban blacks on New Orleans.

[Kenny Pierce]

NxN,

--
Kenny, this very much echoes your premise...
--

It does, as a starting point; but then I think the left takes off in exactly the wrong direction from that starting point. I don't know Aimee, and perhaps she isn't like the fifty other well-meaning college students I've known over the years who sound just like her. Still, my guess is that Aimee's parents understand her position quite a bit better than she understands theirs, despite her naively placid air of superiority to them. (Read her letter again and then ask yourself, "When, d'ya think, is the last time Aimee took seriously the possibility that her parents actually have it right and she is the one who has it wrong?") And when she talks about parsing the issues "in such a way that exposes and addresses our own prejudices," the words "our own" are disingenuous -- I suspect she means "those of my parents and of other people who like me are white but who unlike me are racially illiterate." In other words, by "our own" she means "other people's" -- though she is not being consciously dishonest. Yet in fact the left has a very sizable set of highly questionable, but by them never questioned, assumptions about race, several of which are on display in Aimee's letter, and many of which arguably contributed much more significantly to the plight of the poor urban blacks of New Orleans than did the sort of racism Aimee finds in her parents -- and the odds that Aimee would be interested in having those prejudices exposed are (based on my experience with friends from the left) pretty low, even though it is those prejudices that are actually her "own."

Having said all that about Aimee's letter, I feel obliged to say that if I knew her personally, there's every possibility Aimee would surprise me. I find that most people recite group-think platitudes when in public fora, but if you get them one-on-one and start asking questions they're not used to hearing, then they start giving you their own answers rather than their herd's, and surprises generally ensue. If Aimee were to stop talking in cliches, she would probably find her own voice, and when a person finds her own voice it generally turns out to be a unique one...but you're much more likely to get her own voice if you sit across from her one-on-one for a couple of hours over coffee than if you read her comments on political blogs.

Not that there's anything wrong with comments on political blogs, of course... ;-)

[North by Northwest]

I would like to point to a very calm and thorough post with subsequent comments in equally civilized tone at 'Body and Soul'. Also Body and Soul published a letter sent to it in response to their discussion which I think is a very useful primer:

While race and class are central issues that are largely ignored by middle-class Americans, and therefore need to receive more attention from the left, we need to acknowledge that there is an effective way and an ineffective way to go about approaching the debate. First, realistically, most suburban, middle-class white voters are not going to be prepared for this dialogue, because for them, racism simply does not exist. Therefore, when celebrities like Kanye West make sweepingly reductive statements like "George Bush hates black people," it becomes even easier for wealthy suburbanites to ignore the issues without even so much as a pang of guilt. People like my parents -- who are white, middle-class, and center-right -- refuse to readily acknowledge their own racist tendencies. Though they lock their car doors when they enter heavily black, urban centers, and protest the building of low-income housing in their neighborhoods, they picture themselves as intelligent, tolerant individuals -- and they imagine that the majority of people are just like them. The most threatening form of modern-day racism plays out on this almost subconscious level, and it was this less-overt, seemingly "mild" racism that led to the disastrous handling of Katrina.

Thus, when such individuals hear even the most anodyne soundbites, such as "race may have played an issue in how Hurricane Katrina was handled," they simply scoff at the ludicrousness of such a proposal. Statements from the left therefore need a higher degree of nuance, and since "racism" is such an inflammatory phrase, we need to better define its parameters. We need to make room for a sophisticated, adult discourse on the subject, and we need to stop assuming that all Americans are as class-and-race literate as we are, or they never will be. Rather than attempting to elicit a confused gut reaction on all sides, we need to carefully parse the issues in such a way that exposes and addresses our own prejudices. Instead of caving to the neocon affinity for reductionism, the left needs to advocate a working through of the complexities of such issues. I know, this nuanced approach is exactly what got Kerry in trouble during the election, and it's an arduous task considering the current state of the media, but I really believe it's the best and only way to really resolve these nagging social problems.

So, while I disagree with John Dickerson that we should abandon issues of race/class/gender/sexuality simply because they "alienate independents and moderates," I propose that we need to be extremely careful and tactical about how we do go about addressing those issues, if we ever want the ideal to become the reality. And I do agree with you that they need to remain at the forefront of the discussion.

Aimee

Kenny, this very much echos your premise that:

If you're white in America, and to a large extent if you are non-white in America, you can go for weeks at a time without ever being consciously aware of your own race. If you are black in America, nobody -- least of all other black people -- ever lets you forget it. White people don't understand that black people are forced to be more or less continuously aware of their race. Black people don't generally understand that white people, Asians, etc. think about their own race only occasionally ...

[Kenny Pierce]

OK, for whatever it's worth, I got around to expanding on the previous comment here. No doubt there's lots to criticize; I slammed it out bit by bit while simultaneously running repeated tests of new software I'm writing...

[Kenny Pierce]

Publius,

>
Why is that everything is presumed racial in context before the normal interaction between human beings, between Americans is precedential?
>

It isn't...unless black people are involved.

Okay, so I'll have to do a post on something I learned as one of the few white dudes in the Princeton University Gospel Ensemble lo these many years ago. (1) Americans who aren't black can't imagine what it's like to be a black American who is never allowed -- even more by black acquaintances than by white -- to forget that he's black. (2) Black Americans in general have no clue that the rest of us can go for literally weeks at a time without ever being conscious of our race. Really, unless somebody explicitly raises the topic of race, or unless I've wandered into the wrong section of town, it pretty much never enters my head that I'm white, or that the fact that I am might be relevant to anything. Most black people can't imagine a life in which their race is of so little consequence that it simply doesn't register on their consciousness for weeks at a time.

Had a long discussion on this very topic over wee-hours coffee with my Colombian friend Edgar and his Anglo-Texan wife Vanda...I'll see about writing it up while my software tests are running.

[Publius Rendezvous]

I find these games inexplicable. Why is that everything is presumed racial in context before the normal interaction between human beings, between Americans is precedential?

At some point in time, this country will need to make a giant leap of trust and make a good faith effort to lay what is the past where it is. Without such, any "progress" is all for nought. What progress is to be made, and what progress is to be gained when disengenuous wails are made for the definition of a word? It is nothing short than a disgrace to where the history began, and the prgress made.

These games are trivial.

[Milhouse]

Alexandra, the quote in the Neo Warmonger banner comes from Bush's second inauguration.

[Blossom]

"Alexandra, you come on a black man’s site and say he should be glad it’s not 1955. That's the definition of no class" Can you imagine if you dared say "You come on a white girl site".

Priceless - what a jerk.

[Kenny]

I had ignored the minor flap over Oliver Willis's painfully childish, malicious, and outright dumb attack on Captain Ed, because...well, what exactly do you expect from Oliver? I haven't wasted time on the poor guy's site in a long, long time. But then some of the discussion over at All Things Beautiful triggered a train of thought:

If ever we needed to know why sexual harassment laws that ignore intent are a terrible idea, Oliver has just given us an unmistakable object lesson.

I don't think Oliver should be rewarded for his bile with extra site traffic, so for background purposes, here is Captain Ed's original quote:

I had the good fortune to see Steele speak in person to the Republican convention in 2004, and the man will provide Democrats with nightmares on the stump. Articulate, knowledgeable, passionate, and humorous, he embodies the communication skills of a Ronald Reagan with a keen grasp of policy.

That may sound like a compliment to you, you naive honkey, you, but listen, Oliver pities the fool who sees only the surface meaning and fails to understand that Captain Ed is really a Card-Carrying Racist. Captain Ed's true meaning is helpfully provided to us by Oliver:

Aw lawzy! That Michael Steele is sho nuff one of them “articulate” negroes. One of “the good ones”, you know?

If there were a law against "hate speech" that defined hate speech as "something that makes somebody else in the room uncomfortable, whether there is any inappropriate intent on the speaker's part or not," then Captain Ed would be legally vulnerable to punishment for racism -- for the grave and unforgivable crime of having said that an African-American man was "articulate."

Didn't somebody famous once say, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?" (Oh, wait, maybe that was Bill Clinton...sorry, bad example.)

At any rate, I do think that a reasonable person tries to avoid obviously insensitive language with a notoriously racist history -- such as referring to a particular political figure of Jewish extraction as "filthy Wolfowitz," as Oliver once did. That does not change the fact that it is nothing short of insane -- and intellectually suicidal -- for a culture to decree that a speaker has a greater responsibility to try to avoid misunderstanding than a hearer has to try to discern, and react to, the speaker's original intent. It is impossible to utter any speech on any meaningful and important topic whatsoever without making it possible for those who wish to be offended, to find a excuse for their self-righteous outrage (and there's no question that Oliver finds pleasure in believing that white people who disagree with him, are racist). The only recourse is silence on all significant topics -- and if we do that then the Oliver Willises of the world will decide that silence is a clear marker of racist contempt.

Note that in the original post, Oliver does us the favor of translating Minnesota-based Captain Ed's statement into its "real" meaning -- which Oliver thinks has to be rendered in an absurd pseudo-Southern accent. By the very act of making Captain Ed say, "Aw lawzy" and "sho nuff," he implicitly admits that the kind of attitude he imputes to Captain Ed is an attitude characteristic of a white subculture to which the Captain patently does not belong. But we're still supposed to attribute that subculture's attitudes to the Captain, with no evidence whatsoever that the attribution is valid other than Oliver's intransigent malice against persons Republican. By the time the comment thread has taken off, someone can say, "I’m saying the writer meant well but ultimately fell victim to unconscious structures beyond his control" -- and apparently think he's defending Oliver in so saying. But Oliver's point was precisely that the writer meant evil. (And if Oliver wants to tell me I'm wrong and that wasn't his point...well, that would imply that it's my job accurately to understand Oliver's intent, which is precisely the responsibility Oliver himself failed to exercise. Good luck workin' your way out of that one, Ollie me lad.)

Look, even on the most favorable possible interpretation of the position of Oliver and his defenders, what they think all Republicans are obliged to do, is to stop when they're about to offer any African-American a sincere compliment, and run through a mental list of compliments you're not allowed to pay to African-Americans. If you're complimenting a white guy, you can say whatever you want. If you're complimenting an Asian guy, you can say whatever you want. If you're complimenting a black guy, some things are off limits, because some compliments are really insults if you're talking about a black dude. And if you don't follow this rule -- if you simply call people articulate when they are and refrain from calling them articulate when they aren't without paying any attention to their skin color...why, then, you're a racist bastard.

Meanwhile, Willis himself came out and accused Captain Ed of being a racist. Then when he was called on it, he defended himself by saying that it was Captain Ed's job not to make Willis think Captain Ed was a racist. He accused Captain Ed of racism, and when he got called on it, he defended the proposition that Captain Ed was insensitive. At no point has Willis given even the slightest evidence of showing that he is aware that it was his responsibility to try to figure out what Captain Ed actually felt before accusing him of racism -- and Willis didn't accuse Captain Ed of insensitivity; he accused him of racism. I would submit that no honest and charitable person could have given five minutes' thought to the question of Captain Ed's intent and not decided that it was entirely free of racism. Willis is intellectually dishonest, and when I decided some time ago not to waste time on his site, it was an eminently sound decision. End of story.

[Kenny Pierce]

Alexandra,

You hereby have permanent permission to copy anything you want to copy.

Hope your anniversary dinner was a blast, and happy twelfth.

KP

[Alexandra]

Are you kidding Kenny? I love your long posts, it seperates the men from the boys in the reading department. I posted it on here for the lazy ones that don't press on links, I don't want them to miss it. I still love the other post too, but didn't want to upset you, and so I am humbly asking permission to post that comment too? They are pricessless Kenny, and should really be read as a duo.

NbN, I am really being ignorant now, but what is the show 'Bevies and Butthead' all about? Dare I ask, the title alone is scary.

Anyway, I have just come off Oliver Willis' site, originally simply wanting to track him back, and ending up being slapped around by an angry black guy, channeling Rev. Sharpton, actually it was more like Genghis Khan really, but still.

He has laid a claim on behalf of the African American population, not only on the English language as a whole but the American history: "Alexandra, you come on a black man’s site and say he should be glad it’s not 1955. That's the definition of no class" Can you imagine if I dared say "You come on a white girl site..". This was in response to me simply saying that the date I discussed in my post was a very important date in the history of American civil liberty, much like the comment about it in my post.

So now that was considered a racist comment, as it was delivered by (as labeled by another): "a white conservative female". My response was:

"I came on this site as a white conservative female, and don’t intend to leave as a black liberal male, channeling Oliver, (hairy chest and all) unless you guys have got other plans."

It went onto the subject of Jeff Goldstein's post, where I end up defending one of my favorite bloggers, refering to Jeff's: "As someone who is invested in language and the dissemination of meaning - and in particular, as someone who’s been long engaged in a meta-analyses that proceeds from the thesis that how we believe language functions has practical, real-world consequences, in that our structural understanding of what constitutes a valid interpretation will necessarily find its way into policy and law and legal precedent - I find scratch’s comment absolutely chilling.”

I say:

" I don’t understand why you have difficulties with the paragraph you quoted from Jeff, it made perfect sense to me when I read it. It does not come to a crashing halt, but makes compelling sense in the context dealing with another one of Oliver’s alter egos called “Scratch”, (Oliver, I think ‘Itch’ would sound better, less connotation to disease, you should change that one) who said:

“Articulate” is in the same category as “niggardly”…best not risk it, no matter how appropriate”

So now I know that makes Wilbur feel all warm inside, but in reality, and in the multicultural world that I certainly live in, it is scary. I don’t live in this ‘Let’s slap each other around ‘cos one is black and one is white’ world. And Jeff articulates just that, and in my opinion very well. I still struggle Frameone, why you are so vehemently opposed to his style of writing. He is, as he says he is, invested in language and the dissemination of meaning, and in particular, someone who’s been long engaged in meta-analyses .

Secondly, in your quote:

“My argument has been that granting primacy to the interpreter for determining “meaning” relativizes language and destroys the ground for interpretation.”

The author will always have the primacy to determine meaning, and the interpretation is left to the interpreter. However , if, as in Ollie's case (even though you are not talking to me under your real name I am getting sort of attached, in a sweet kinda way), you as the interpreter lay a claim on that primary right, FEATHERS WILL, AND DO FLY! Ollie may attempt to control the terms of the debate, or attempt to lay a claim to the word ‘articulate’, but he cannot touch the sacred primacy of the author’s right to determine meaning. The reason why inherently it destroys the actual grounds for interpretation, is because in any argument, you have to establish a starting point which in this case would be the author’s original intent. If you try to manipulate that intent or interpret it in any way, prior to the onslaught of the debate, you destroy the very grounds to interpret it. It is a slippery slope in the wrong direction, and actually away from the idea of free speech."

Stand by for update.

[Kenny]

I had ignored the minor flap over Oliver Willis's painfully childish, malicious, and outright dumb attack on Captain Ed, because...well, what exactly do you expect from Oliver? I haven't wasted time on the poor guy's site in a long, long time. But then some of the discussion over at All Things Beautiful triggered a train of thought:

1. Words and phrases carry connotations due to the way they've been used historically, and those connotations can be in outright conflict with the strict denotation of the word or phrase. It is quite true that Southern racists have historically been capable of complimenting "articulate" black men in a tone of voice that clearly implies that black men are in general unusually inarticulate; and such a compliment is offensive. But it of course doesn't change the fact that persons who are not Southern racists almost certainly have never used the word "articulate" as anything but a compliment. That set of connotations is a historical accident associated with the particular experiences of a limited group of people.

2. Because different groups of people have different experiences with the same words and phrases, the connotations can vary dramatically, making it practically impossible for a human being to utter any sentence remotely relevant to anything controversial that somebody won't find offensive. For example, Ann Althouse finds it offensive for John Roberts to use sports analogies, because feminists of Ann's (and my) generation are accustomed to perceiving the male use of sports analogies as betraying insensitivity to and disrespect for women. Ann appears to think that Roberts should tell himself, "There will be ladies listening; so I need to avoid sports analogies, since sports are a guy thing." But my young friend Vanessa would find it outrageously offensive and sexist and patronising for Roberts to avoid the use of sports analogies when in the presence of The Weaker Non-Sports-Playing Sex; feminists of her Title-IX generation find the idea that sports are a guy thing to be intrinsically sexist and offensive. So when it comes to the use of sports analogies, Roberts is damned (by Ann) if he does and damned (by Vanessa) if he doesn't.

3. It is the primary responsibility of any well-meaning speaker to express himself with clarity, so that the audience can see precisely what points he is making.

4. Along with this, it is the responsibility of any well-meaning speaker to consider the audience to whom he is speaking, and, if he is aware of any connotations that would render a particular phrase painful or offensive to his audience, to avoid those phrases if other phrases are available. But of course, this assumes that the audience is a reasonably homogenous audience. Where the audience is highly diverse, different sections of the audience will react differently to different phrases, and it becomes more and more difficult for any speaker to find a phrasing that both communicates his point clearly, and keeps from accidentally poking sore points in some portion of the audience. Therefore the more diverse the audience, the more the speaker's responsibility shifts toward clarity of expression and away from inoffensiveness of phrasing. A person speaking to a single individual whose personal history he knows well, can certainly be expected to avoid sore topics and to cater to his friend's pet peeves. A person speaking to the entire nation cannot be asked to avoid everybody's pet peeves at once; it's absurd for Ann to expect John Roberts to pay slavish deference to her pet peeves when by doing so he will violate Vanessa's.

4. But it is the responsibility of any well-meaning listener who hears a word or phrase that could be considered offensive, to take into account the speaker's history and apparent intent, and if there is no good reason to consider the speaker malicious, the listener has no business taking offense. And the broader the audience to whom the speaker addresses himself, the less right the listener has to expect the speaker to cater to the listener's own pet peeves and to the idiosyncratic sensitivies of the listener's subculture.

In the particular case of Captain Ed and Oliver, Oliver has (apparently) a list of compliments that he has heard used as disguised insults, and that he therefore finds offensive in the mouths of white people. On the other hand, most white people of good intent genuinely believe that the opposite of "racist" is "color-blind," and that to have a list of compliments that can only be applied to people who aren't black, is itself to be racist. Therefore if Captain Ed calls a black politician "articulate," Oliver damns the Captain as racist; if Captain Ed refuses to call the man articulate because he's black, others will condemn the Captain for his racism (i.e., his lack of color-blindness).

What the Captain has decided to do is perfectly reasonable for a person addressing the entire, astonishingly diverse American nation, and it is exactly what Roberts decided to do: he said what he wanted to say as clearly as he could, and if people from particular special-interest groups wanted to use the Captain's/Roberts's phrasing as an excuse to be snarky, then they were welcome to their snarkiness, which snarkiness says considerably more about them than it says about the Captain/Roberts. The Captain thinks that Steele is exceptionally articulate (not "for a black guy," but "for a politician," as would agree anybody who had to listen to the Senators' questioning of Roberts); so he said so. If Oliver wants to get his panties in a wad, well, that's his right in America, where even the stupidest speech is free, and where you're free to dislike anybody you want to dislike whether you have any good reason to or not. But there is simply no way Oliver can credibly argue that the Captain intended his remarks in a racist sense. Therefore Oliver fails, dramatically, to fulfill the responsibility of the well-meaning listener in responsible discussion.

Which, to anyone who has read more than about five of Oliver's posts, is anything but a surprise.

[North by Northwest]

Kenny,

What is it with these discussions. We know they won't change anything; we know they are not changing anybody's point of view; we know they are not open-minded; and most importantly, we know they most likely become unpleasant, end up placing us in an invidious position, often leaving us with a foul aftertaste. So, why do we bother? Beacause inactivity yields the floor:

Rupert Murdoch had that figured when he started Fox Network and charged Barry Diller with ushering in the era of 'Bevies & Butthead' and the likes such as 'The Jerry Springer Show', aka reality TV. Mass audiences, the majority in every nation, are defined by the lowest common denominator. Appealing to the largest numbers ensures generating the most cash. So far for the basic economics.

And it's the OW's of the bloggosphere who are pandering to this lowest common denominator. The smart ones do it conscoiusly the not so smart ones do it because they can't help themselves. And they are doing a good job too.

And? So what! Sure there is a lot of anger out there, a lot of injustice and hardship. Everyday struggle to make ends meet. Domestic violence, rape and abuse. But prior to the bloggosphere, awareness creation was largely passive. Now it's interactive, up-close and personal. And that's fantastic. That's why I jump in; that's why I appreciate the OW's of this world with their commentators and all.

Because, maybe, just maybe a difference can be made; understanding can be furthered; positions can be shifted and viewpoints altered - there's some insight to be found in OW's thoughts - even if it only serves to realize how deep the paranoia is still embedded, how large the chips on the shoulder still are: Remember Igor: "Hump, what hump?"

And maybe, it serves to highlight areas where there's no paranoia but real injustice. That's surely worth it!

Tallyho! (that should wind them all up...)

[Kenny Pierce]

Well, after I posted my first try, I reread it and didn't like it. So, despite my distate of second drafts ;-), I tried again here. It's better. Don't bother with the other one.

[Kenny Pierce]

Lilly,

"It is too ridiculous for words..."

Does that make you inarticulate?

I'm very relieved to have just proved that I'm not a racist, do we not? -- since I'm clearly not calling you articulate... ;-)

Kenny

[Kenny Pierce]

Hey, Alexandra, I started a short little comment and it got way out of control...so I put it on the blog instead, here.

You should feel complimented; I've largely ignored this raging controversy up until now. The Captain and the Blogfaddah didn't manage to drag me in, but you did... ;-)

[Lilly]

I agree with Alexandra that "The subject is so ludicrous it is not even worth debating. Articulate means racist?" I never could have dreamt that this word could be derogatory. It is too ridiculous for words, and Jeff and Ed explain quite adequately the remainder.

[North by Northwest]

Great photos, as usual!!!!
My favorite is the drawn analogy between the photo of the guy in hospital with his ass hanging out, and Ed's famous sentence: "Thus every blogger, in his kind, is bit by him who comes behind ..."
Ouch! Oliver's behind must be hurting, and what with eating Jeff's nails for breakfast, he's not having a good day, huh?