Race Cowards and the Risk of Race Talk

Early in last year’s presidential campaign, I began suggesting that it presented the perfect opportunity for an honest discussion about race in this country, particularly in the workplace. During a speech on February 18, Eric Holder, our first African-American Attorney General, urged Department of Justice employees to begin a meaningful dialogue about race.

Holder said that racial progress had been made in the workplace, but almost nowhere else. On the weekends, he said, social interaction among people of different races doesn’t “differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago.” He called the U.S. a “nation of cowards” for not openly, seriously discussing race issues.

On the same day of Holder’s speech, the New York Post published a cartoon of two police officers standing over a chimpanzee they’d just shot, with a caption that read: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” The Post was immediately assailed for its racism — for comparing President Obama to a chimp and implicitly encouraging his assassination. 

The Post said the cartoon was playing off of a widely distributed story a couple of days earlier about a pet chimp that had been shot by police officers after mauling a friend of the chimp’s owner. The Post did concede that the authors of the stimulus bill were no better than a team of trained monkeys.

This reminds me of several posts (Don Imus, Tiger Woods, Saturday Night Live, Geraldine Ferraro, LeBron James, monkey comment by Obama delegate, Curious George and Obama, NASCAR, South Pacific, Jesse Jackson, New Yorker, Kwame Kilpatrick, Charles Rangel, post-Obama election, Gran Torino) I’ve done previously about why it’s so difficult, perhaps impossible, to have the discussion that both Holder and I say we’d like to have.

Just as I applauded then candidate Obama for his speech on race in March of last year, I applaud General Holder for his forceful remarks to his employees. I wish all CEOs were willing to make the speech he did. I also wish we could have heart-to-heart discussions about race.

Post-type incidents cause many not to engage in those discussions, however, because of the risk of being labeled racists. I wonder if Eric Holder thinks it’s possible for a white person to make fun of a black person without being a racist or being called one. In other words, when having these race discussions, can we joke around with each other about ethnicity? If someone goes too far without intending to, can we discuss that in a meaningful, non-threatening way? 

As I noted in one of my previous posts about race, portraying LeBron James as King Kong on the cover of Vogue Magazine was okay, while putting a noose on the cover of Golfweek Magazine after a controversy about Tiger Woods wasn’t. I’m sorry, but I don’t get that. Does that make me a racist or just a dunce?

The Post cartoon isn’t scary because it could carry with it a tinge of racism. (I’ll concede that it could.) It’s scary because the reaction to it is reminiscent of the reaction to the Danish cartoons about Muhammad that resulted in the cartoonist’s death. I’m not suggesting that Al Sharpton’s predictable comments about the Post cartoon indicate his desire to kill anyone. I am suggesting that he seems just as interested in keeping alive racial sterotypes as those who “cling to guns and religion” and said they’d never vote for a black man.

I suspect that observation will make me a racist to some. I regret that, but I don’t regret making the observation. If we’re going to talk about race in a meaningul, uncowardly way, then let’s do it.

1. 

   gene says:

   March 28, 2009 at 4:17 pm

   talking race with minorities?why not poison you’rself,or hang you’rself!the protected spiecies of this nation do not want anything to do with the white devil slave owners!period!!no white man would dare distroy what he has made for himself or his family to crash and burn for a race card carrying individule like eric holder!if he wants to talk about race,let him go to his good ole boy’s,al sharpton and jesse jackson,both race card holders for 35 years!his kind of people!