11 January 2010, a Monday

Obviously a slow news day with nothing of comment in the NYT and this headliner on the WaPo:

Margaret Thatcher seemed nonplussed about what to respond. Other female heads-of-state from around the world were likewise not free to comment. Condi Rice wondered if she’d been dissed for being...well, you know that nasty word...Republican.

But wasn’t there a Democrat lady who once was SOS? Hmmm...who remembers now?

I enjoyed this headline item, too:

Macho baseball players never rub the spot where the ball hit them and only glares as he trots to first base. They like it quite a lot less when he charges the mound and hits them back.

What’s that? Is glaring an over-reaction? I dunno...Fareed?

How quickly they forget, Tom Daschle muttered under his breath.

Dodd was smart enough to see the handwriting on the wall. Daschle and Reid were and are too stubborn, although I suppose in Daschle’s case he really thought he might win a close one.

Had he been a white Republican, however, THAT would have been racism from a Honkie! Or maybe a Hymie.

Mr King, there are a lot of Negro/black/African-American (your choice) basketball and football and baseball players we quite often hear on television. In 99% of the cases if you couldn’t see the picture, only hear the sound, a listener of either color would be able to correctly identify the race of the speaker. Call if by any word you like if you don’t like ‘dialect’, but there is a certain sound associated with the way the two races speak, quite aside from regional accents, and that’s all there is to it.

If you weren’t being racist you’d remember the early radio days (that was like television without pictures, if you aren’t my age and don’t remember) there was a "correct" unaccented way to speak if you wanted to be a successful radio announcer. Almost all were white in those days so racism had nothing to do with it.

Radio’s "Amos and Andy" were actually white people, which apparently most listeners did not know, but could ‘tell’ they were black because of the way their voices sounded. When Jack Benny was on the radio, nobody had to be announced "and here’s his Negro slave, Rochester" in order to know that Rochester was black.

But, do you know what’s funny? In the end, King is correct. Today they hurl the charge of "racism" against anyone they don’t like who for whatever reason acknowledges the fact that they can distinguish between people of different races. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be racial to be disparaged...Hispanics aren’t a race, are they?

In the end the discrimination described as "racism" is really the ability of one group of people to distinguish "the other" among them. The more differences "the other" displays, the further away he is from being accepted.

Barack Obama recognized this by the Christian church he elected to join and in which to be baptized. The original charge against Obama made by the black community, for those who remember even if columnists do not, is that he wasn’t BLACK ENOUGH. You hear that kind of remark from African-Americans today about members of their own race who have "gotten too white". Racism knows no bounds.

Reid was not being racist but a realist when he was evaluating Obama’s chances of getting enough white voters on his side to win, and two of the things which lessened his "otherness" was his relatively light skin color as well as the fact that a listener would have been unable to tell he was black simply by listening, any more than they could tell by listening that Amos & Andy, on the radio, were really white.

But what would you like to bet? I’ll bet you that Colbert King, listening to them on the radio in those early days, knew simply by listening that they weren’t really black but whites pretending to be black. He could tell. Any takers on that one?

Reid was merely being pragmatic. The less you look and sound like "the other" then the better your chances of acceptance are, and it doesn’t matter which "other" group we’re talking about. That isn’t racism; that’s reality.

People need to lighten up. (Oops, don’t take that wrong!) I remember that great scene from "Airplane" where the white stewardess couldn’t understand the black passengers except for an elderly white grandmother who explained brightly that she "spoke jive".

I live in Costa Rica, have an adopted 6-year-old who is Hispanic, and there are a number of Nicaraguans living here, as well. Our Costa Rican maid (the local term would be Tica) tells us that our little boy speaks Spanish with an English accent. To me he speaks "little boy" accent when he speaks English (if you heard him over the phone you could guess he wasn’t an adult or even in his teens) but some sounds he makes are Spanish in character. I’m well aware that I speak Spanish with an English accent, no matter how hard I try...and some in the United States have said I speak English with a Southern Utah accent. (I can usually tell a "native Utah boy" when I hear one, as I surprised a couple of Embassy officials by guessing where they came from.) And some Nicaraguans here, locally called Nicas, speak a version of Spanish that some of the Ticos tell me they have difficulty in understanding, while others do not.

Many Ticos likewise assure me they can distinguish Nicas by sight and sound, whereas I cannot. My Tico friends, therefore, can distinguish both Nicas and Gringos like me as separate from themselves, whereas to me they are too similar to one another and thus both are "the other" to me.

Being able to distinguish differences does not make one a racist. It’s the manner in which you TREAT the different people as a result of only that distinguishable difference which makes you a racist or not.

I’m far from fond of Harry Reid, a deliberate understatement, but "racist" is not one of the names I’d ever apply to him as a distinguishing characteristic.

Blogito, Ergo Sum - HOME