Practicalmadness

So, apparently despite suggesting Barack Obama is the Democratic frontrunner only as what Keith Olbermann termed an “equal opportunity stunt,” Geraldine Ferraro is not a racist. Nor are Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter or Bill O’Reilly.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about this strange phenomenon of non-racists who just happen to think less of black people in Slate:

Implicit to the racist card is the idea that no racists actually live among us. After reality TV star Duane “Dog” Chapman was taped by one of his sons dropping n-bombs, a more loyal son insisted, “My dad is not a racist man. If he was he would have no hair. He’d have swastikas on his body and he would go around talking about Hitler. That’s what a racist is to me.”

The idea that America has lots of racism but few actual racists is not a new one. Philip Dray titled his seminal history of lynching At the Hands of Persons Unknown because most “investigations” of lynchings in the South turned up no actual lynchers. Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren’t racists. That’s because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps Mein Kampf in his back pocket.

Let’s call it “country club racism” — the kind of soft bigotry that comes from having never really needed to interface with actual honest-to-god black people on anything like an equal footing. And it’s not strictly an upper-class phenomenon. You’ll find it in poor suburbs and small towns, working-class neighborhoods of big cities, anywhere where you have a tight-knit group of white folks whose only interactions with African-Americans are over a fast food counter or Wal-Mart checkout lane.

True story: back when I was in high school in Birmingham, Ala., one of my classmates came over to my lunchroom table. He had a cartoon he wanted to submit for publication in a student newsletter I was editing, called “Winnie-the-Jew and Nigger Too.” You can probably imagine what it looked and read like. I was appalled, and I think I barely managed to spurt out a question of whether he thought it was appropriate, or whether he thought it was racist. And he was like “nnnngh, I dunno, I just thought it was funny.” And you know, I absolutely believed him. I have no doubt in my mind that that kid — who, by the way and no fooling I swear, just starred in a major motion picture — “just” thought a picture of Winnie-the-Pooh in a yarmulke was hilarious, just like Gerry Ferraro thinks she’s “just” tellin’ it like it is.

Updated April 3rd when I realized that somehow the Markdown filtering never got turned on, and this post has looked like nonsense for weeks.