Entries tagged “racism”

Michael Blim summarizes the news from the Supreme Court over on 3quarksdaily; I wish this had gotten the coverage that the iPhone did, or even that people were camping out on the streets lining up for justice. Blim provides us with the amazing sight of Justice Clarence Thomas quoting Justice Harlan of the Plessy Court’s white supremacist justifications:

“The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, *if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty*. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. (words in italics omitted by Thomas)

A curious omission there, Justice Thomas. Justice John Paul Stevens, the elder statesman of the court, isn’t so easily fooled. From his dissent:

There is a cruel irony in THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s reliance on our decision in Brown versus the Board of Education. The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: ‘Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.’ This sentence reminds me of Anatole France’s observation: ‘The majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.’ THE CHIEF JUSTICE fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways THE CHIEF JUSTICE rewrites the history of one of this Court’s most important decisions.

Note his use of the word “our” here: Stevens was on the court for the Brown v. Board decision. One would hope that would make the rest of the Justices respect his opinion even more, but apparently not.

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.