JOHN MCWHORTER JULY 21, 2010
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
This week’s Big Story on race reminds me of Married With Children. Really.
Not because of the NAACP’s role in the firing of the Agriculture Department’s Shirley Sherrod. Obviously, in the wake of their well-advised and masterfully civil demand that the Tea Partiers disavow racism officially, to them a video of a speech made to their own members by someone appearing to condone reverse racism was poison.
Which would have made sense if that’s what the video showed. But it didn’t, especially when viewed in toto (but actually only barely even in the clip). They were hasty in condemning Sherrod solely on the basis of the clip.
And, not “snookered” by Andrew Breitbart or anyone else, despite the NAACP’s Benjamin Jealous putting it that way. As lightning fast as the news cycle and the blog culture are today, no one can be “snookered” into refraining from watching something that lasts 45 minutes, the length of, say, two episodes of Married With Children (no, that’s not how that show fits in here–but just saying).
But in the past I have spoken truth to the NAACP enough, and this is not the week to nitpick over their conduct. I am still glowing from their behavior last week.
It was an example I didn’t expect to see of the kind of “conversation” on race that Eric Holder memorably said we never have last year. I was deeply unimpressed by that remark, because what people like Holder really mean by that is, as I have often said, a conversion, not a conversation. What they mean is that whites need to listen to blacks explain why racism is still a serious problem. I see no purpose for that “conversation” and do not blame whites for having lost interest in it.
But if there can really be a “conversation” that includes things like Benjamin Jealous calling on the Tea Party to disavow racism while actually admitting that the group itself is not founded on racism, then hallelujah.
In the same way, if part of the conversation can be a black Agriculture Department bureaucrat standing before a black audience and explaining how her cultural sense of whites as the enemy was tempered by her career experience and that she is now more inclined to think about class than race, then hallelujah. These are conversations!
And then here comes someone like Andrew Breitbart, taking one clip from it and proposing that the woman was standing before the NAACP and patting herself on the back for being a reverse racist, with the audience members happily cheering her on. And this is not a church service, mind you, with someone whipping up the crowd with zingers and melodic cadences. This is people sitting listening to what used to be called an address.
I can only assume that Breitbart’s misinterpretation of Sherrod is due to the A.D.D. tendency described in the recent New Yorker profile of him, something he sounded almost proud of. He admits not having watched the whole thing; too hard to refrain from tweeting for 45 minutes, I guess. For him to be able to watch a sober-minded, intelligent woman making that speech and come away thinking of her as taking the line of Jeremiah Wright makes him, quite simply, cartoonish to me. Like something out of Married With Children, a live-action cartoon which I must admit I am a huge fan of.
Maybe it’s because I just finished watching through Season Seven (yes, I admit it!) that I can’t shake thinking of Breitbart here as a living Al Bundy. This is actually how Al Bundy would process the Sherrod tape.
The Breitbarts among us need some Conversation Lessons too. If people like Jealous and Sherrod learn that it’s not always fifty years ago, people like Breitbart need to learn that most black people do not harbor the politics of Tavis Smiley (upon which my post about Jesse Jackson’s irrelevance is, in fact, relevant).
Sure, you’ll find a ragtag bunch of underoccupied men playing cops and robbers hopped up on old photos of Huey Newton and talking about “crackers,” titling themselves the “New Black Panthers.” But this doesn’t mean that in the real world Michelle Obama would sit before a group cackling about “whitey.”
If America is really going to have any kind of useful “conversation” about race, it can be conducted neither by the likes of George Jefferson nor Al Bundy. The “race monger” this week is Breitbart—on her good days, even Kelly Bundy had a better ear for nuance than his.
12 comments
A couple of things I do not understand. First, why have so many commentators gone straight from the revelation that Ms. Sharrod is not a racist to beating up on the NAACP, USAD, and the Obama administration for being taken in by this edited video. I am sorry, the culprits here are Breitbart and FOX. Second, how can an otherwise wise man watch Married With Children.
- mjhill
July 22, 2010 at 12:09am
Not to stray too far from the substance of this fine post on "Sherrodgate", but McWhorter quite likely would agree with me that "Married... With Children", for all its puerile toilet humor, was also a clever satire of the American Dream at a time when most television sitcoms were insipid paeans to it.
- ATuring
July 22, 2010 at 12:49am
Married With Children is the greatest sit-com EVER!
- e065702
July 22, 2010 at 9:23am
Shame on Mr. McWhorter defaming Al Bundy. Al wasn't nearly as devious. Plus he was a lot, lot funnier.
- tnmats
July 22, 2010 at 9:33am
mjhill, I agree that Breitbart is an evil little bastard, however I don't blame Fox. It was the adminstrations fear of Fox that led them to jump the gun. The only good I can see coming out of this is if to Breitbart someone becomes a synonym for taking items out of context and presenting them in such a way as to cast the person who made the original statement in the most negative light possible. It would be wonderful if Breitbart becomes a synonym for evil.
- blackton
July 22, 2010 at 9:48am
"I was deeply unimpressed by [Eric Holder's "conversation"] remark, because what people like Holder really mean by that is, as I have often said, a conversion, not a conversation. What they mean is that whites need to listen to blacks explain why racism is still a serious problem. I see no purpose for that “conversation” and do not blame whites for having lost interest in it." Funny, because I often find that people on the other side of the divide seem to want a conversion rather than a conversation as well. Their ideal vision of that "conversation on race" might look something like... White People: "Black people have got to STOP!" Black People: "Stop what?" White People: "You KNOW what!" Black People: "OK, you're right. We'll get right on that." Now, I suspect from reading previous McWhorter columns that he does see a purpose for /that/ conversation, but I have trouble blaming other people (of any description) for believing it won't accomplish any more than the version Mr. McWhorter suspects Eric Holder has in mind. The plain truth is that nobody, guilty or innocent, cheerfully tolerates being shamed or lectured about their behavior, especially by an outgroup. If I had an easy solution, I'd offer one, but from where I sit the most effective social remedy for racial animus seems to be waiting for old people to die. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying the ineffective ones, because improvement on the margins is still improvement. And who knows? Maybe there's an easy solution out there that can only be teased out through mutual suspicion, hypocrisy, and frustrating back-and-forth.
- austinexpat
July 22, 2010 at 10:02am
Fox News: "Don't blame us for Sherrod getting fired! We only report and endorse the fake-news. We don't tell you people (read: The Administration, NAACP and the USDA [and regular Amuricans, too]) to believe it!" As a poster wrote over on Talking Points Memo, "Fool me once (ACORN), shame on you. Fool me twice, call me a democrat."
- caseykap
July 22, 2010 at 10:06am
By calling Breitbart "cartoonish" and accepting his claim not to have seen the whole tape, you let him off the hook. He doesn't deserve such lenient treatment. He certainly doesn't extend it to anyone else.
- heppner52
July 22, 2010 at 10:23am
If the reverse had happened in the W administration - say, Wolf Blitzer had doctored a tape of some low level bureaucrat to make it seem he was endorsing lynching and W fired him before the facts were in - I can't help but think that only an infinitesimal amount of the coverage after the fact would have focused on W,'s mishandling of the situation. Instead, the outrage over CNN and Blitzer's actions would have been so deafening as to drown out what little criticism came W's way. We know for a fact that Blitzer would be disgraced, and would never darken the doors of anything like a respectable news organization for the rest of his life, not because of the outrage of conservatives, but because of the outrage of liberals. A liberal who wrote an entire column about the affair and devoted most of his/her column inches or pixels to W's defaults and not Blitzer's would draw the ire of other liberals (probably including this one). And you know what? That's a good thing. Too often, we fall into the trap of thinking that there must be some equivalence between "conservatives" and liberals" or that Fox News is the conservative equivalent of CNN, MSNBC and the NYT. But there's no equivalence, primarily because at some point - usually a point that occurs pretty early in any of our daily teapot tempests - liberals will be held accountable to some version of the truth. That's for two reasons. One, for all their manifold faults, mainstream "liberal" news outfits don't lie on purpose, and correct their lies (in most cases, not lies, but facts reported inaccurately due to negligent fact-checking) when they're identified. Second, because non-conservatives in general credit most of what they read in the mainstream press as being true, liberals who get caught doing something they ought not to be doing can't rebut the charges by claiming they're being "persecuted" by "the media." Thus, John Edwards is disgraced (rightfully so!), but David Vitter is still a Senator. Conservatives are in the catbird seat. Their journalism doesn't have to be true. They can throw ridiculous stuff against the wall day and night to see what sticks, without losing "credibility" because they have no credibility to worry about. Their audience won't be turned off by false charges (in fact, most false charges will still be believed by most conservatives even after they've been conclusively debunked) - all they care about is the charge that will finally bring down their enemies. That's epistemic closure, baby. It's a lot harder being accountable to the truth than it is to be loved by unthinking people (I'm looking at you, Sarah), but it's better than the alternative.
- Geoff G
July 22, 2010 at 11:20am
Good points, Geoff. I'll just point out an example of the reverse: Dan Rather and the W bush National Guard papers. (though I don't believe Dan Rather purposefully set out to distort the way Breithbert did.) Rather was sent packing, but Breitbert is practically being celeberated by the Right.
- scrubby
July 25, 2010 at 10:30am
scrubby, there's a big difference here. Breitbart didn't fabricate. He excerpted without revealing the full context. The left has done their share of this too, probably more so than the right. To feign outrage at this point is kind of silly. Rather and team fabricated, and many on the staff new it was a fabrication. Big difference.
- seattleeng
July 25, 2010 at 6:15pm
The difference is that, despite some very peculiar aspects of the Rather/Bush records affair, Rather took the punishment and suffered the consequences. I don't see that happening here -- in fact, I see a kind of evasive crowing on the Right despite the fact that the moral lesson of Sherrod's story is easy to read for any normal human being with some basic moral decency. But possibly that's in short supply in that part of the spectrum.
- ironyroad
July 25, 2010 at 11:38pm