Back in the late 1980's, Howard Stern used to call up a local Klansman and put him on the air. The Klansman said, "We don't hate. That's a lie. There ain't no point in hating a nigger or a Jeeeeeewwwww, any more than you hate a rat or a dog or a fly. It ain't their fault. They're just born that way, and they got to be controlled, that's all."
That's the pure stuff, the test batch. It's fair and correct to call it racism. Racism refers to the belief that one race is genetically superior to another. Using our Klansman as a litmus, I think the test is in the imagery--the image of beasts, or of something at least not human. Without that idea lurking somewhere around, I don't see how a statement can be called racist.
People, though, aren't usually as up front about things as the Klansman. Here's some trickier imagery from Pat Buchanan (it's the end of his keynote address to 1992 GOP convention):
They had come into LA late on the 2nd day, and they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage.
Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.
God bless you, and God bless America.
Buchanan was talking about the recent Rodney King riots. What color was the "mob"? Black. What was the black mob doing? "Molesting old people." Who is to do something about it? We (white people) are: "So we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country." How? "Block by block"--that is, with force and with violence. The GOP convention had just been summoned to racial warfare, and they cheered.
Do these images meet the "animal" test? Buchanan, the master, says only so much. He lets the listener's subjective emotion do the rest of the work. And so it is that one longs, from the description, to mow down the murderous sea of black molesters with an automatic weapon as one would shoot down a pack of rabid dogs.
Molly Ivins had the best line about that speech. She said that "it probably sounded better in the original German."
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We proceed up the slippery slope. "They're animals, those blacks"--the vision of Stern's Klansman-is racist. Invoking the image of a black mob that is "molesting" old people, and then saying "we will take back our cities, and our culture, and our country" is racist, though less explicitly so. That's why it's called "race baiting."
There is plenty of other cross-racial invective, however, that is further upslope, invective that doesn't imply a thing about genetics. Some of that invective is hateful as hell, but it still doesn't cross that line. Here is the big speech of Rev. Jeremiah Wright that had white America in an uproar:
And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. [True.] She put them on reservations. [True.] When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. [True.] When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. [True.] She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, [all true, unfortunately, even the experiments] put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness[ all true]... The government gives them the drugs [false on this one, Rev, sorry] built bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America. No, no, no, not God bless America! God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating her citizens as less than human. [True.] God damn America, as long as she pretends to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.
Is there anything here that even suggests some sort of defective white-person hardware, some inherent, genetic white-person malfunction or shortcoming? There is none. It doesn't meet the test. Whatever else you want to call that particular speech, you cannot call it racist. And the infamous ending, while clumsy, merely paraphrases Jefferson's sentiments on slavery: "I tremble for my Country when I reflect that God is just."
People call the guy a hater. It's so. If to recite the facts (except for the drug thing, which he should really leave out) and then point the finger and curse about the facts is hate, well, then that's hate. But it ain't racist. Not by Stern's Klansman, and not by me.
"Racist," in short, is a fairly useless term. It expresses a strange, archaic idea that has been pretty well marginalized for over half a century. If you want to discuss the "racist" theorizing of Richard Wagner's Parsifal, an opera about the racial composition of Christ's blood; if you want to discuss that opera's considerable influence on the young Adolf Hitler; if you want to discuss Adolf Hitler's theories of genetics, if you want to talk about Stern's Klansman, you'll be talking about racism, and you'll be on solid ground. Step away from there, and the ground gets very shaky very fast.
That won't stop people like Sean Hannity and his opposite number, Al Sharpton, from throwing the word around. The word is quite useful to such people, in the way the word "fuck" is useful to a third-grader. It produces screams and panic and instantly focuses the spotlight. The best thing anyone can do in such a situation is to take a deep breath, and ask the little boy:
"What, exactly, do you mean by that?"