I found this comment to roxymeteorite's diary about the use of the term "surrender monkey" to describe the President particularly illuminating as to the crux of the issue:
Can't you even begin to fathom how arrogant it is for any white person to presume to know the life experiences of a black person well enough to have equal standing to debate what's racist to them, and what isn't?
by scribe on Thu Jun 16, 2011 at 09:49:12 PM PDT
It's relatively common in America today that we encounter the following situation: very few people consider themselves to be racist or consciously make racist comments, yet racial minority groups of all types report frequently encountering speech that they consider racially offensive. It must be then that people often say things that they themselves do not believe to be racially offensive, but which are in fact perceived as offensive by at least some members of the minority groups in question. The same dynamic exists with respect to speech that might be considered offensive for reasons other than those related to race -- gender, religion, sexual orientation, language, nationality, etc. -- but for discussion sake, I'll focus on race.
The simplest answer to this probem would be the following rule: if members of the minority group perceive something to be offensive, then it is offensive, and that is the end of the story. A person could potentially be excused for making the mistake of using a term like "surrender monkey" once, but once informed of its offensive nature, there would be no excuse for that person not simply apologizing, and making it a point to never use it again in that way.
Unfortunately, in the real world, things can't be quite that simple. If a person making a certain comment, does so without in fact having any racist intent whatsoever, it's very difficult for them to apologize for making a racist comment, because to do so would be a tacit admission of having committed an act of racism. Nobody wants to admit to being a racist, even inadvertently, so there's a natural tendency to want to assert and defend the non-racist intent of the original comment.
In addition, few of us would like to live in a world where members of minority groups have the exclusive right to determine what is racist and what is not. There would be no limit to the potential absurdity. By way of example, I would invite you to consider the following:
CULVER CITY, Calif. (KABC) -- A graduation card sold at local stores has been pulled from shelves after a civil rights group raised concerns about the content. The group claims the card's micro-speaker plays a greeting that's racist.
. . .
"And you black holes, you are so ominous. Watch your back," the card vocalizes.
"That was very demeaning to African American women. When it made reference to African American women as whores and at the end, it says 'watch your back,'" said Leon Jenkins of the Los Angeles NAACP.
When Hallmark was reached by phone, they said the card is all a misunderstanding. The card's theme is the solar system and emphasizes the power of the grad to take over the universe, even energy-absorbing black holes.
http://abclocal.go.com/...
No, I guarantee you this is not a Saturday Night Live skit gone viral (I happen to know some of the NAACP officials in the report). I challenge anyone here to fail to acknowledge that this one goes a little too far. There have to be some parameters.
A second way to look at it then would be to focus on the intent of the speaker: if the speaker in fact did not intend for the communication to be racist, then it is in fact not racist, no matter how it was perceived by the listener. In this case, because the use of the term "surrender monkey" was in fact not meant to convey a racist sentiment, and has in fact been used in the past to refer to people based on characteristics having nothing to do with race, then it's not racist.
Unfortunately, in the real world, this rule doesn't seem to work very well either. Just because someone happens to be ignorant of how their speech will be perceived by members of a minority group does not thereby alter the actual meaning of the words in question. To put it more bluntly, even the proverbial "bubble boy" with zero knowledge of the world outside of his cocoon is going to be in for a rude awakening if he calls the first black person he sees an "n-word". The "n-word" used by a white person to describe a black person negatively is racist. Everyone knows it, and it doesn't matter if the speaker and/or the black person in question do not
And thus we get multiple 1000 comment flame wars from a single offhand comment . . .
So, how do we get out of this conundrum? I might suggest the following as a "third way" to look at this: an acceptance on both sides that there are in fact certain things that are objectively racist and certain things that are not, and this objective, shared reality exists independent of both the intent of the speaker and the perception of the recipient. And when I say "objective", it's not in the scientific sense, as much as the linguistic sense. Words have meaning only is so far as they are effective at communicating something, and they don't communicate anything if they do not reflect a shared understanding between the speaker and the listener.
That may all be a fancy way of saying that in my view, determining whether a particular comment is racist or not, one must consider not just one point of view, but many: the intent of the speaker, the perception of the listener, and the general understanding of the meaning of the words in question. It's not fair and right to exclude any one of those three sources of information from your analysis. So I disagree with those who would say that white people do not have "equal standing" to engage in a debate about the meaning of an allegedly racist term with members of a minority group. I would also disagree with those who say that if no racism was intended, then it is by definition not racist.
Somewhere in between the intent of the speaker, and the perception of the listener, and the general understanding of words and phrases in the wider world, there has to be an "objective", mediated understanding of whether something is racist or not, and no one has the exclusive right to be the arbiter of that understanding.
