Noli Irritare Leones

I offer you, now, a wide spectrum of opinions on Biden’s remarks, with some of which I vehemently disagree.

In the “with friends like this, who needs enemies department,” we have, first, an article from the Pittsburgh bloggers network

Everyone is beating him up for saying he’s the first really articulate, clean-cut, young black candidate for president.

He sounds like Yale or Harvard law school rather than the ghetto, is what Joe means.

It’s true.

So, according to this blogger, all poor, misunderstood Biden meant was that, unlike most blacks apparently, Obama doesn’t sound like the ghetto. Gee, that’s reassuring. I’m glad we cleared that up.

Second in the “with friends like this, who needs enemies” department, we have Bob Felton

Obama’s political views are waaaay left-of-center,

In some alternate conservative reality where the entire Democratic party is “waaaay left-of-center.” Seriously, is there any Democratic front runner, ever, however moderate, who hasn’t been described by certain conservatives as “waaaay left-of-center”? But on to the meat of the post.

What else is there, then, but the sense that he’s … “like us,” somehow?

He has an education, that is, an engaging family that he seems to enjoy, and speaks in comprehensible sentences. He is reflective, frank about his uncertainties vis-a-vis the Big Questions, comes across as a regular, agreeable sort of guy.

He is, you know … like us.

Wow. Just wow. This guy is defending Biden by agreeing with his critics about what “articulate” means. It doesn’t mean that Obama is a silver-tongued orator like Bill Clinton. It means that he can actually succeed in speaking in comprehensible sentences. That, there, is the sound of millions of white people way less intelligent and educated than Obama, sighing with relief that this Columbia and Harvard-educated man is “like us” in having a grasp of basic grammar.

The reason for the indignation, of course, is that so much of contemporary black leadership, and so much of black culture writ large, are at pains to not be “white,”

Because it couldn’t possibly be the least bit offensive to suggest that black people are normally incapable of forming comprehensible sentences. Look, I’m on record as saying I don’t get why “articulate,” when applied to one of the most eloquent political figures around, is offensive – but you know, if you want to convince me that maybe I’m wrong in my assessment of the connotations of the word, when applied to a black man, well, Bob Felton and anonymous Pittsburgh blogger, you two are doing a good job.

Fortunately for Biden, he has defenders who are less offensive than these two. First, the Economist.com blog Democracy in America comes out with two posts defending Biden. One post rounds up references to white politicians as “articulate” and (metaphorically) “clean,” and produces an audio link to show that Biden paused between “first mainstream African-American” and the string of adjectives praising Obama, and so is a victim of poor punctuation. The second argues that, after all, Obama is just about the first African-American presidential candidate to whom Biden’s entire list of qualifiers applies:

In his response to Mr Biden, Mr Obama says no one would call Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun or Al Sharpton inarticulate. I would add that they all seem to be nice-looking and bright as well. But what about the other two adjectives? Can Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson (or Alan Keyes for that matter) seriously be considered mainstream? During his many campaigns for office Mr Sharpton never made a serious effort to win the white vote. As for Mr Jackson, his “hymietown” comment in 1984 hardly represented mainstream thinking. And while Ms Moseley Braun could be considered a mainstream candidate, she didn’t enter the 2004 presidential race with an entirely “clean” image—unproven allegations of corruption during a past senatorial run dogged her campaign.

Shirley Chisholm seems to be the only figure who does fit Mr Biden’s description and I’m guessing that the senator simply forgot about her.

Richard Thompson Ford, on the other hand, argues in Slate that it doesn’t matter whether Biden is a bigot

It’s widely known that by many reliable accounts, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was something of a racist, as was typical of white Southerners of his age. He might well have flunked Banaji and Greenwald’s test. But of course Johnson worked tirelessly and at real political cost to ensure the passage of modern civil rights legislation. His professional and personal dealings seem free of the stain of bigotry. By contrast, as Jacob Weisberg has suggested in Slate, one need not think President Bush a bigot in his heart to think that his reaction to Hurricane Katrina bore the hallmarks of racial insensitivity. If Bush didn’t care about black people in New Orleans, that was not because of his personal racial animus, but because of his institutional priorities. This was not a political constituency that mattered to him.

Like Price Waterhouse, a political party or executive branch that allows racial prejudice and indifference to affect decisions is a larger problem than the bias of an individual.

Of course, this all depends on just how good you judge a candidate to be in general, and just how bad a misstep you judge him to have made – I doubt we’d have many Jewish takers for Mel Gibson for President, for example. But it’s certainly possible to both see Biden’s remark as mildly condescending and not rule him out as a candidate. Steven Barnes of Dar Kush takes just that view:

Now, if I’d heard him say that, I would still have a slight sense of condescension–white candidates never say things like that about each other. It’s a little like the way white people love to rush up to me and say how “articulate” I am. I know where it’s coming from, and am not insulted–it’s hard to get over three hundred years of brainwashing saying that black people are mush-mouthed (especially when too damned many athletes and rappers in the public eye seem all too eager to prove the stereotype right). But you can be certain that Biden’s campaign just died, before it could flap a wing. Pity. I would have enjoyed hearing his ideas. And by the way–when I first heard this, I assumed he was a Republican, and had the identical reaction, and would have posted this just as quickly.

Others are at more pains to express just what’s wrong with the word “articulate.” Stentor Danielson of debitage takes me to task (gently) for not getting it:

I was a bit surprised to see that Lynn Gazis-Sax doesn’t “get it” with respect to why Joe Biden’s description of Barack Obama as “articulate” is problematic. But her explanation as to why she doesn’t get it highlights a basic difference between progressive and liberal viewpoints. She notes that John Edwards is also often described as “articulate,” …

Nevertheless, calling Obama “articulate” is more problematic than using that word about Edwards precisely because of the men’s races. The liberal view of race, as expressed in Gazis-Sax’s quote above, is based precisely on a refusal to allow the race factor to be taken into account. The liberal says that if we act as if race doesn’t exist, racism will be taken care of. Colorblind equality of treatment — achieved by asking “would I do this exact thing to someone of a different race? — is the order of the day.

Progressives, on the other hand, recognize that our actions don’t happen in a vacuum. Rather, our actions occur within a complex and racially-biased social structure, which filters and shapes their effects. A superficially race-neutral act can end up having strongly disparate effects on people of different races, because it pulls on a racially-biased string in the social network.

It’s a useful distinction. Actually, I think I range somewhere between liberal and progressive in my views of race, as Stentor uses the terms. I do tend to use “how would this sound if applied to a white person” as a test, often, and, after all, color-blindness is the world I’d ultimately aspire to. But if you just ask “would I do this exact thing to someone of a different race?” and ignore the whole context of your acts, you get, in the extreme case, the silliness of the folks who post in comboxes insisting that, until you go find every single black person who uses the n-word and duly chastise them all, you have no business getting on white people’s case for using the word. Which is obvious bullshit; whether black people reclaiming the word among themselves is a good idea or a bad one, we all know darn well what the n-word means coming from a white person’s mouth. And, of course, context may similarly matter for words and actions less obviously ill meant. Figuring out when you need to pull in some other context, rather than just applying the simple “would I say the same thing about a white person” test, isn’t so obvious, though. So my first cut is to apply the simpler test, but be open to being persuaded that there may be context that I’m missing.

Finally, via Christy of Dry Bones Dance, here’s Afro-Netizen’s Clean as a whistle, sharp as double-edged hope on Joe Biden’s gaffe and what white people see in Obama. Like Christy, I still haven’t decided how much of this post I agree with, so I’ll leave it without comment for now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 6:28 am and is filed under Blogwatch, Election 2008, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.