Is "Racism" going to lose any and all meaning as a term?

(01:28:38 CDT)

Is "Racism" going to lose any and all meaning as a term?

I do not know much about the Ann Roy Moore case. I do know that people have started saying that it is racism motivating her dismissal. One guy even went so far as to imply the equivalency of a lynch mob (on the other side, we have some of the Tea Party movement implying taxes are somehow just like the Holocaust...maybe public education is failing us?). Presumably getting $100,000 in pay for working half a year in an auxiliary role is the new hanging. Note that this is even before her replacement is picked, a replacement that might be black.

When Mayor Tommy Battle bounced a bottle cap off the dias during a city council meeting, it was less than 24 hours before this comment showed up: "Well, I can just say for me," wrote Walker, "to see an elected authoritative Caucasian male mayor totally lose his cool and have the utter gall to throw something at or near a senior African American male Councilman ... I'm just speaking for me ... very much carries 'racial' overtones."

Helen Thomas was recently poked hard into retirement after saying that Israelites need to get the hell out of Palenstine and go back to the countries they came from. More open in attack than the above two examples, but surely not a purely anti-Semitic opinion in the light of Israel's less than a century age and the long, hard fight that has been accompanying it the whole time.

Go back about a week or two before that, and you had the hooplah over Rand Paul's contention with a specific title of the Civil Rights Act. Namely, he said it was wrong for a government to forbid private businesses from banning certain customers based on things like race. He said he was against businesses actually being racist, but he felt that a private business should have the right.

How about we go slightly historical, here, and look at the 2002 or so comments by Senator Lott: that the country would have fewer problems if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948. It was Strom's 100th birthday. I honestly believe Lott when he said that it was just a sentimental statement, not an open declaration of Thurmond's segregationist past.

Then you have Sotomayor's comments, the Glenn Beck claim that Health Care Reform is reparations, Rush's moronic tirade that white kids getting beat up on the bus is somehow Obama's fault.

What I am getting at is the fact that you have the Left and the Right dancing with glee to shove fingers in the others face and declare racism over what amounts to one off words or actions that might have involved a mix-race meeting but had no other flavor of being racially motivated. And we are not talking about Michael Richards' "Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass," or Mel Gibson's "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." We are talking about comments and actions largely motivated over something else: Huntsville's schools issues, neighborhood issues, Israel attacking an aid ship, discussion of how much the government should get into our private lives, and...well...anything to bash Obama. People are off-the-cuffing.

I can not condone most of what was said (except, maybe, give Lott a pass and say that I don't think Moore's issues are due to race) but I can say that racism, as a concept, is a much more horrendous thing that we seem to think. We are in an age of soundbites being taken out of context and very tenuously connected to other, more damaging soundbites. It's like a quantum leap of clips, where one clip which might have one meaning is linked to another clip with another possible meaning which is linked to some definite, horrible meaning, three degrees or more from the original clip. When Don Imus and pals were a collective dick and called a team "nappy-headed" they were being dicks and did indeed attack a stereotype. They did not, however, carefully choose a word specifically for it's biting, racial commentary. Likewise, when douche candidate called the Indian-American intern "Macaca", I don't think he was saying the guy was from the Congo, whose people were [somewhat rarely?] slurred against with that phrase. That's like me calling a French-man a "Cooly" and getting reamed for using a "well-known pejorative" against French people, because my mom's people kind of came from a place that might have called Chinese workers "cooly". It's mindboggling. Are we really chasing the demons of racism past, here? Are we really fighting the good fight? Or are we so out of real things to talk about that we fall on to any straw-man or lop-sided argument that comes our way?

I don't think I have a real point to this, besides this one question: have we entered the age of some new post-racism where the main thing holding us back from moving beyond racism is the need to find racism? That can't be true: see Gibson and Richards, above. Drunk or angry, you don't spout that shit unless you believe it. There are real racists out there. People were slaughtered in Darfur, are being slaughtered in Darfur, because of what essentially started as discussion of which ethnicity was getting what. And while not all of the anti-Mexican fervor is actually racist as opposed to fear about ballooning medical and school costs, enough of said "build a damn fence" movement is racist enough that it will have many ticks on its back for a long time. No, obviously racism isn't dead. Then why is this need to take and dig and try and find racism where it is not? I mean, look at the oil spill out in Gulf. Many of the outcries above strike me as driving out in the Pacific, looking for any signs of an oil spill, and ignoring the one that is there. Am I reading these things wrong? Or are attacks, say, at the Tea Party as being "disturbingly racist and reactionary, from its roots to its highest branches," doing anything but setting up an argument that sounds really damning, but doesn't do much to actually convince those who don't agree with that one maxim—that the Tea Party is primarily racist—to make a stand?

Let's call a bigot a bigot, by all means, but let's stop citing historical examples, greatly understated, as a cheap way to win the argument. It's Godwin's Rule as a genetic algorithm, and part of me feel it's a slap in the face of those who actually suffered, were beaten and hanged and gassed, for the shape of their chromosomes.

Rant off.

Si Vales, Valeo

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