Apropos of our little discussion a few weeks ago, Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts on defining a racist. To some degree, he's talking about measuring racism on a semi-defined scale.
[T]he context in which something is said, and the identity of the speaker obviously make a great deal of difference in how we react to the speech. But if there is in fact a hierarchy to hate speech, on what basis should comments be judged? I'm curious to hear the thoughts of others on this.
Gladwell proposes a scale based on content, intention, and conviction. This neatly forgives people who simply mis-speak, or those who unintentionally offend without malice, while properly condemning those silver-tongued few who are able to say vile things about groups of people without using any actual slurs or epithets.
Race is always a difficult topic -- every time I write about it on my blog, I get a few defensive comments that I mostly don't publish, a few IMs from white friends saying "I'm not sure that's fair...", a few IMs from black friends saying "You're being a bit presumptuous again..." and then a whole lot of people, including most of my readers saying, essentially, "BOOOO-RING!"
Maybe we should make this more fun? With a clear scale for measuring racism, we could make a website for it! (raceometer.com is still available.) Enter in your potentially racist speech, get back a racism score, and put the badge on your site. The fact that we've got three dimensions to measure on means that you could have a Race Cube, whose size would increase based on how offensive you truly were. If you came up with something horrendous, but you didn't really mean it, you'd get a zero in "conviction" and end up with a flat square.
Or if you're Mel Gibson, and meet all the requirements, maybe you'd prefer a trading card game, where you could boast about your score. And then hopefully the truly racist cards would become increasingly rare over time and this kind of offensiveness would exist only as a thriving market on eBay. I've included an artist's rendering here for collectors.
How about "slapthegibson.com"
It takes two to cause offence. One to give it and one to take it. While I don't often consciously give offence, people often take it. Isn't it possible to dream of - and strive towards - a world where we all try to avoid taking offence as well as giving it?
As a mild 50-something, I've seen words like 'eskimo' and 'red indian', innocuous in my youth, become descriptors of hate. But they weren't originally. And you get the absurd situation of the 'euphemism treadmill', where speech that was once innocuous becomes 'hateful', and then turns innocuous again.
A few years back someone negro, I mean black, I mean coloured, I mean other-raced, I mean African-American (I mean not American at all!), I mean Afro-Carribbean, I mean black, called me a honky. I didn't know what it meant - still don't. Except that someone said it's a derogatory term for a white man, I mean caucasian, and that I should reprimand the caller.
Nope, I said, I won't play that game. He's he's naming me, and I'm a nice person, ergo I guess he's being nice to me.
Of course, Owen Wister said it so memorably in the Virginian: "When you call me that, smile".