Delusions of Mediocrity

Words and Deeds

A commenter at Pandagon says:

My own parents . . . would no more use the phrase "African American" than they would eat dirt. Their polite word is "Negro," and their more typical one is the one I refuse to write. Still, my father won several awards from the black students' association at the college where he taught and my mother got a citation from the NAACP in our county for her work supporting black-owned businesses as a loan officer.

I'm sure you know many people who are the opposite, who are very, perhaps even exaggeratedly, careful about the terms they use when talking about other races—but have appalling attitudes. So, is it more important to talk the talk or walk the walk, and without saying the n-word isn't so bad or anyone should get a pass on it, is it as important to police its use in people like, well, like Karen's mother? I certainly accept the idea that the terminology is an element that goes into coloring one's attitudes, but I don't think it determines them. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the presumption that someone who uses the n-word is a racist, but what does one do if the rest of the evidence says otherwise?

Just some good old boys, never meanin' no harm

Like worms that come to the surface after a spring rain, so do conservatives always appear to defend young, wealthy white men who are accused of rape, as in the case of William Kennedy Smith, Alex Kelly, and now a goodly portion of Duke University's lacrosse team. The wagons have circled, my friends, and you can all but compose the soundbites yourselves: these are fine young men from good homes who would never do such a thing, the morals of the "victim" must be questioned, it's a shame that so many lives have to be ruined for what was most likely a misunderstanding, and, my personal favorite, let us not apply such a inflammatory term as "rape" to what amounts to nothing more than a "youthful indiscretion." The mud in the case of the Duke students is especially thick and slimy, being that the alleged victim is a black stripper, hired to entertained the accused at their frat house. Rush "Mr. Class" Limbaugh referred to her as "ho" during a broadcast, which is to be expected, but as this post at Alas! A Blog1 shows, there are more rational-minded people who are going so far as to dissect the 911 calls made the night of the incident to disprove the accusation. Everybody wants to play Special Victims Unit, which is a fun game to be sure, except that a lot of it seems to be done merely to prove the commonly held belief that rape is a largely meaningless term that women throw around when they get the notion to fuck up some innocent guy's life. The fact that Duke, a privately run institution, chose to punish the alleged attackers by ending the lacrosse season early is especially creating a tizzy, with complaints that their rights to be innocent until proven guilty are being violated, rendering them victims of the vast racist conspiracy against young white men.

David Yeagley of FrontPage wrote an especially ugly, venomous tirade on the case, managing to espouse an astounding number of cliches, including:

~~Strippers aren't good mothers. While he doesn't say this specifically, he does curiously put the word "mother" in quotes when describing the alleged victim, as if there's some question there.

~~White men are at the mercy of lying, opportunistic blacks all the time.

~~Because some of the young men in the frat house were under 21 and drinking, they cannot be held responsible for their actions.

~~Despite being outnumbered forty to two, the alleged victim and a friend, who apparently left before the attack took place, should have been in full control of the situation, simply because they were older.

~~The fact that the alleged victim left the frat house at one point and then came back proves that a rape didn't take place.

~~None of it matters anyway, because you can't rape a stripper.

Given how often Yeagley mentions the alleged victim's race (the word "black" is used fourteen times in an eleven paragraph article, and never to describe the color of somebody's clothing), and referring to her as "a party girl" who is "not a person of note," "expected to do tricks for clients," and "showed less maturity than a six year-old," it seems like he has a personal beef to get out of his system here. Perhaps somebody got stood up on prom night, quite possibly by the president of his high school's Black Enterpreneurs Club.

One wonders how much pity Yeagley will maintain for the poor oppressed Duke students when he catches wind of an e-mail sent after the incident by one of the accused, Ryan McFadyen2, in which he claims that the next time he is the presence of strippers he will kill and skin them "while cumming in my duke issue spandex." But hey, boys say stupid things, he probably didn't mean anything by it.

Please be forewarned, the Smoking Gun link contains a graphic police report of the incident, and may be triggering to sexual assault victims.

1. With thanks to Pandagon for providing the links.

2. Who, if I can make my own racist, sexist judgment in the spirit of David Yeagley, looks exactly like the type of person I'd expect would do this kind of thing.

Delusions celebrates Black History Month

It must be February.

Now is the time when schools and libraries across the country stop doing real history and pretend to believe black people are important or interesting.

It's a coincidence that Black History Month¹ is the month with Valentine's Day -- February was chosen because history teachers wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible² -- but it's appropriate, because it's very much the same sort of thing: it's devoting a lot of attention all of a sudden to something which should be equally worthy of attention year-round. Just as saying "I love you" to your partner on all but 364 days of every year isn't the same as showing affection, saying "let's study the history of the black people now" for a month isn't the same as being inclusive. It makes February the back of the history bus.

(Right off the bat I make no claims to originality.)

¹Googlefight found six times as many references to "black history" as to "African-American history."

²Fact not guaranteed accurate.