When Touré comes out to the panel late in the show, he describes a moment of transcendence he had while skydiving that, if he had listened to black peers that told him skydiving is just not something black people do, he never would have had. I completely, 100% agree with the fact that people (of all colors & genders & religions, &c.) miss out on positive, enlightening experiences in pursuit of some identity & I seriously appreciated that point. But the experience he describes is one of those “The world is incomprehensibly beautiful, therefore the only possible conclusion is that God exists & created it” moments that are spiritually (& intellectually) superficial & drive me insane. He celebrates how overcoming someone else’s irrational subjective racial understanding led him to an irrational conclusion about objective reality. Womp. Just like with the ideas from his book (which, again, I haven’t read), Touré only gets me halfway there.Then things get really meta. Maher & Touré later talk about the inherent racism in denying racism in racist acts. “Denying racism is the new racism,” says Maher. Of course, when he originally said this a week earlier, it was in the context of the likes of Herman Cain who falsely believe that race is in no way a barrier to anyone’s success anymore which many people, usually located in the South, will quickly & happily tell you isn’t true. But in this segment, Touré & Maher start getting into some murky water. Speaking more about specific acts of racism, Touré compares racism to fog - something that’s there but hard to put into one’s hand & show someone. He can see something racist happen & to him & many others it’s obvious, but it’s less clear to others. In such circumstances he says that “Being asked to prove it is, in and of itself, racism.” This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous.
The phenomenon they’re talking about is actually pretty well summed up in the birther controversy. Lou Dobbs was right when he said that, on a philosophical level, a country has the right to see any President’s birth certificate, so how it is racist to ask that of this President? We could just as legitimately have asked George Bush or Bill Clinton, so how’s it racist when we ask Obama?
This question is exactly the kind that Touré is talking about. Explaining why the situation is racist is difficult, “foggy” to use his terminology. Many people who opposed this controversy knew deep down in their gut that there was racism at the heart of the issue, but couldn’t quite put their finger on it. So I sympathize with where Touré is coming from, but the blanket statement “Being asked to prove it is [...] racism” comes from the same oversimplified, naïve thinking it criticizes.
I don’t believe it’s ever impossible to show that something is racist. Sometimes it’s a matter of time & imagination & you’ve very often already left the classroom or dinner table where racist thing was said or done, but if it’s racist, it’s racist. In the case of the birther movement, Lou Dobbs & others are right that we should be able to ask this of any President, but we didn’t & wouldn’t ask it of “any” president - we’d have thought it absurd to ask Bush or Clinton or John McCain to validate that they were American - we only asked it of the black one. It certainly is a fair question, but it was being asked in an unfair, racially motivated way.
The danger of Touré’s statement come from the fact that people very, very frequently mislabel something as racism. Since the word has such huge moral, social & psychological implications, its use shouldn’t be taken lightly or go unchallenged. Not only is “racism” thrown around as a catch-all phrase for any kind of xenophobia (i.e. people decried the #blamethemuslims hashtag as racism, not islamophobia), but people often miss the mark when they’re actually using the word they mean. As I wrote in this article about Vogue’s then-titled “slave” earrings, people were right when they said that the earrings were racist, but they were usually wrong about the way it was racist. Many complaints exposed the complainer’s racist assumptions, not the manufacturer’s. I just read a comment on a New York Time’s article that said abortion advocates were actively trying to make life difficult for Muslims & Hispanics whose religions found abortion abhorrent, which is a false way of thinking. There’s a difference between opposing anti-abortion laws (or rap music or getting your nails done) & thereby concluding that Muslim/Hispanic (or black or women’s) culture has some adjusting to do & opposing Muslim/Hispanic (or black or women’s) culture & then hating everything you believe is symptomatic of that culture. When you paint the picture that it’s racist to ask someone to justify their claim of racism, you ignore that difference.
While it may be hard to prove the way in which something is racist, it’s not impossible. A lot of the time a person cries “racism,” they’re reacting more to the racist bits in their head than anything inherent in what the person they’re accusing did. I would challenge Touré to reach into the fog. If the racism is real, it’s simple, objective, & tangible. If not, you’ll find your hand in your own head.
Tawakkalna ala Momo. [MdG]
