Crying Wolf

Hey fellow liberal bloggers, could we cool it on the charges of racism? There’s a pretty big difference between being a racist and being a moron. I’m pretty sensitive to this sort of thing, but poor word choice isn’t always an indication of some white supremacist Freudian slip. Sometimes it’s just an indicator that the writer is a dummy. The more we liberals casually throw around the word “racist”, the less people are likely to believe us when we’re confronting real racists.


posted by greg on September 14, 2006 @ 2:24 pm

5 comments »

  1. I agree, and though I am a bleeding-heart liberal about most things, I think we need to extend this attitude of realism to our Guvernator’s latest little “racist” comments.

    I was thinking about how often my friends will make comments about someone (like “he’s a spicy Latin lover!”) that are quite similar to what Shwartzenegger got “caught” saying. This doesn’t equate to racism–they’re just quasi-funny generalizations that don’t at all equate to our true feelings about the worth of a person based on their race. There’s plenty of actual policy and hypocrisy surrounding Shwartzenegger, and I thought such a rather inoffensive comment, said off-record, got way too much publicity from the blogosphere.

    Comment by dAnimal — September 14, 2006 @ 4:20 pm

  2. I read the article. How anyone could think he was, in any way, saying that racism is good news is beyond me. It was obvious that he meant pessimists, IE people who love looking at the worst side of things, will be delighted by this bad news. Maybe if he’d quoted the Modest Mouse album title “Good news for people who love bad news“, the hyperventalators over at Los would have got the damn joke.

    Seriously, only an idiot could read that and think the writer meant racism = good. I don’t even think it was a poor choice of words. he was using a literary joke so old it’s practically a cliche.

    Comment by Ross Lincoln — September 14, 2006 @ 6:44 pm

  3. I meant over at Kos. Not “los”. Anyway, my point still stands. Each and every person who somehow failed to get the obvious, bitter irony in the opening line is an idiot. Thanks for calling bullshit on that, Greg. Word.

    Comment by ross Lincoln — September 14, 2006 @ 6:50 pm

  4. I too was pretty perturbed by Drum and Kos yesterday. I also thought the point was fairly obvious in a confusing double-negative kind of way. I certainly didn’t read ant racism in it. It was inartful at worst.

    I saw the Drum post early on and wondered what the fuck his point was since he seemed to answer his own query.

    And kos piled on, and then even after linking to the perfectly plausible and acceptable explanation by the author, still takes a shot at him.

    Both of them are being dicks.

    Comment by Mr Furious — September 15, 2006 @ 8:10 am

  5. OK, I’ve done some research and it appears that the governor likes to dress up as a gothic vampire drag queen at night and drink human blood. So let’s drop this whole politically correct race thing right now, it’s gotten way out of hand.

    Comment by Kamachanda — September 16, 2006 @ 3:37 am

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