More ethnic silliness

The most recent roundup from Taranto has a lot about speech silliness in it so I am just going to reproduce that below. Taranto can be a brain-strainer at times with points that are often a bit subtle and hard to follow but I think the comments below are generally pretty straightforward (by his standards, anyway). I have put in my own subheadings

Hispanic correctness

The Sonia Sotomayor hearings were something of a snooze, so we suppose we can't blame the Associated Press for trying to come up with something--anything--to write about. Even so, this is a bit much. Yesterday the AP tried to transform some humorous banter into an outrage:

One of Sonia Sotomayor's Senate interrogators had a joking response Wednesday when she talked hypothetically--and humorously--about getting a gun to shoot him in self-defense.

"You'll have lots of 'splainin' to do," replied GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, evoking the 1950s TV show "I Love Lucy" to laughter from the crowd and the judge.

"I'd be in a lot of trouble, then," Sotomayor quipped back.

What Coburn said--and how he said it--was a riff on a Hispanic television character, Ricky Ricardo, whose accent is now widely considered a broad parody

Ricky Ricardo, played by Cuban-born Desi Arnaz, would often use this line with his fictional wife, Lucy, played by real-life wife Lucille Ball. The AP successfully sought out a denunciation of Coburn's bon mot:

The National Council of La Raza [Spanish for "the race"] responded to an e-mail inquiring about Coburn's remark, saying it was unclear whether it was a badly told joke "or he's just clueless."

"While quoting Ricky Ricardo isn't in and of itself a slur, in this context, it seems wildly inappropriate to say the least," said the group's spokeswoman, Lisa Navarrete.

A comparison

Meanwhile, the AP reports from Chicago that the Sears Tower "was renamed the Willis Tower on Thursday in a downtown ceremony":

Mayor Richard Daley and Joseph Plumeri, who heads Willis Group Holdings, the London-based insurance broker that secured the naming rights as part of its agreement to lease 140,000 square feet of space in the tower, unveiled a sign with the new name in the tower's lobby.

"Willis is investing in Chicago. Willis is investing in Chicago. That's positive," Plumeri said during Thursday's ceremony.

We doubt we'll ever call it Willis Tower. To this day we refuse to refer to the skyscrapers in our own backyard as the MetLife Building and the Fiat Building.
But we digress. What caught our attention about this AP story was the headline: "What You Talkin' Bout, Willis? Sears Tower Renamed." What the AP said--and how it said it--was a riff on a black television character, Arnold Jackson, whose accent is now widely considered a broad parody.

Child actor Gary Coleman played Arnold in "Diff'rent Strokes," which debuted on NBC in 1978. Arnold and elder brother Willis (Todd Bridges) were the adopted children of a wealthy, WASPy widower, Philip Drummond (Conrad Bain). Whenever Arnold was incredulous at something his brother had said, he would employ the catchphrase the AP referenced in the headline (though the Internet Movie Database spells it "whatchoo" rather than "what you").

The AP dispatch with the ethnic sitcom reference in the headline ran yesterday--the same day as the AP dispatch about Coburn's ethnic sitcom reference. We don't find the AP headline "wildly inappropriate," but the AP's search for someone to describe Coburn's comment that way is wildly silly.

Black correctness

On a somewhat less silly note, the Hill reports on an unpleasant encounter in another Senate committee hearing:

The President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) tore into Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) Thursday for what he said were "condescending" and "God awful" racial statements at a hearing.

NBCC head Harry C. Alford took strong exception to Boxer having referenced an NAACP report favoring climate change legislation during a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which Boxer is the chairwoman.

"Madam chair, that is condescending to me," Alford said. "I'm the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and you're trying to put up some other black group to pit against me."

We watched the video, and we can see Alford's point. Boxer does come across as condescending, and, weirdly, she doesn't even seem to understand why he would find it offensive for her to rebut his argument not on the merits but via a racially specific appeal to authority.

Yet Alford, by speaking on behalf the National Black Chamber of Commerce, is himself relying on just such a racially specific appeal to authority. We tend to agree with Alford and disagree with Boxer on the subject they were discussing, but the rule of etiquette he invoked--blacks may claim authority on account of their race, but whites may not seek to undermine that authority--put her at an unfair disadvantage, one that was particularly unwarranted given that the topic at hand had nothing to do with race.

Obama seems to think it is enough just to think and talk about the evils of the world

On his trip to Ghana last weekend, President Obama delivered a well-received speech. He also gave an interview to CNN, in which he discussed slavery and its legacy, as the network is reporting today:

On his trip in Ghana, Obama said the nation and the world should never forget the scourge of slavery because it's still relevant in today's world.

"I think that the experience of slavery is like the experience of the Holocaust. I think it's one of those things you don't forget about. I think it is important that the way we think about it and the way it's taught is not one in which there's simply a victim and a victimizer, and that's the end of the story," he said.

"I think the way it has to be thought about, the reason it's relevant is because whether it's what's happening in Darfur or what's happening in the Congo or what's happening in too many places around the world--you know, the capacity for cruelty still exists."

"So trying to use these kinds of extraordinary moments to widen the lens and make sure that we're all reflecting on how we are treating each other, I think, is something I want my kids to think about and I want every child to think about."

This whole comment underscores one of the things that bothers us most about Obama. He says that slavery is "relevant" to today's humanitarian crises in places like Darfur and Congo. For the sake of argument, let's accept that this is true. What are we supposed to do?

Well, we're supposed to "never forget" slavery, to "think about it," to improve "the way it's taught," to "widen the lens," to "make sure we're all reflecting." Oh, and he wants "every child to think about" it.
By Obama's lights, then, it would seem that understanding slavery is important because it yields an endless supply of endless abstractions with which to respond ineffectually to contemporary humanitarian crises. While every child is thinking about this stuff, is the president of the United States doing anything?

Source