Don imus funeral services televised

What Can You Say?

What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race

John Hartigan Jr.

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hartigan, John, 1964– What can you say? : America’s national conversation on race / John Hartigan Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-6336-3 (alk. paper) 1. United States—Race relations. 2. Racism—United States. 3. Post- racialism—United States. 4. Communication and culture—United States. 5. United States—Race relations—Press coverage. I. Title. e185.615.h325 2010 305.800973—dc22 2009049990

Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond Pro

For Beka for everything

Preface ix

1 From Gangsta Parties to the Postracial Promised Land: A Year of Race Stories 1

2 Waking Up to Race with Imus in the Morning 27

3 Narrating Nooses: Locating the Role of Race in Jena, LA 58

4 “Race Doesn’t Matter”: Manic Glimpses of a Postracial Future 91

5 Conversation Stoppers: Apologies All Around 141

6 Our Unfi nished Conversation 182

Acknowledgments 193

Notes 195

Index 215

Contents

THIS BOOK BEGAN as a fi le folder on my desk in which I kept clippings of news stories about race. Th e idea was to keep on hand some current examples of how race matters today, which I could use to update my lectures or my writing. It quickly fi lled and then gave way to a series of similar folders, each labeled with a proliferation of titles—“race and health,” “workplace discrimination,” the “race gap” in education, and many more. I also subdivided these into “liberal” and “conservative” lines of argument and debate.

Th ese articles ranged from reports of particular incidents to cover- age of new poll results on racial opinions and to recent fi ndings from studies on discrimination. Th ey also included excellent journalistic es- says and critical commentaries that sharpened my thinking about race. Eventually, too, there were stories about coverage of race in events like senate races or other political campaigns. As the fi les grew, I began to see a broad stream of public discourse unfolding, a meandering current of commentary, refl ections, and reporting. Th en I started to think about the larger question of how we settle on which examples have the great- est bearing in telling us something substantive about how race matters today. Sometimes these thoughts were sparked by the glass-is-half-full- or-half-empty debates over whether racial disparities in this country are diminishing or remaining fairly constant. But also, I wondered about the representativeness of any one example or incident as they just kept occurring, sometimes in novel forms, sometimes as maddening repeti- tions of the same old stories. Which ones were most exemplary of the enduring signifi cance of race?

Eventually, I realized this question itself warranted a book. I set-

Preface

x Preface

tled on a framework as much out of practicality as based on an ana- lytical rationale. I would take a year’s worth of stories and examine how they refl ect the interpretive process by which Americans make sense of race. In terms of the rationale, I thought the value of this approach lay in trying to understand something about how we as Americans con- sume these stories, apart from their status as examples in arguments that race no longer matters or that it remains the bedrock problem in this country. But really, this decision was a practical one as well—the stories just never stopped coming. I settled on a year’s framework, in part, be- cause there was no other way to get this project off my desk and into the light of day.

As I write this preface, President Obama just reworked his criti- cism of the actions of the Cambridge police in “stupidly” arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home. Gates fi gures prominently in the fi nal chapter on this book, appropriately enough on the dynamics of apologies for racial incidents. Th is “new” story perfectly melds the elements of obviousness, ambiguity, and utter discrepan- cies that “racial” often entails. As well, it features remarkably well-cast characters—Gates, certainly, as a preeminent scholar who has incisively grappled with race; Sergeant James Crowley, a police expert on racial profi ling; and, of course, our nation’s fi rst African American president. Yet, in resisting the urge to add still another chapter, I hope I have set- tled on something else of value instead.

Th is book is about our “national conversation on race,” the sprawl- ing, unwieldy, often maddening means we have developed in the United States for discussing and evaluating what counts as “racial.” I focus on the underlying dynamics of American culture that shape this conversa- tion more than on the particular topics that variously surface and then recede. Th at is, I attend to the rituals and taboos, the selective vision, and the stylized reactions that culture generates. We humans are cul- ture-bound creatures, and as Americans we share an underlying culture that is far more powerful than our various crucial, poignant, and devas- tating divisions. Th is common culture is on display in this particularly curious cultural artifact—our “national conversation on race.” I hope that in having this underlying culture drawn to your attention you will

Preface xi

fi nd a way to think diff erently about race. Whether or not you do, I re- main certain that this conversation is a long way from over.

Inevitably perhaps, most writing on race is polemical. Th is stems from the fact that it is nearly impossible to have an entirely neutral stance about whether or how race matters. Race is clearly a political and polarizing issue; as well, the urgency and importance of racial matters compel us to take emphatic positions. At the same time, the polemics around race make it devilishly diffi cult to settle important questions, such as, when and how does race matter? My aim here is to present a view onto our racial polemics, via that oft-referenced “national conversa- tion on race.” What I ask of the reader, then, is a bit of patience as you encounter on these pages voices and positions that are antithetical to your own views on race. Th e clash of liberal and conservative stances on race may be too powerful and passionate for you to suspend your own well-honed reactions, but my hope is that this book provides a means of stepping back from the fray to consider what might underlie all this turmoil.

THEIR FACES ARE CONFIDENT AND CONTENT, which makes the images all the more absurd and bizarre. White college kids at Clem- son University, displayed on Facebook, are draped in black garb, hands duct-taped to forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor. Th e women are arrayed with huge hoop earrings, and two guys are wearing baseball caps—one of them scowls behind his dark shades. Other whites in the crowd sport red bandanas on their heads and gold “grills” on their teeth. Th ey ap- pear drunkenly awash in a sea of racial signifi ers, seemingly oblivious to any lines they may be crossing. Th e “gangsta” theme party was held over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 2007. What were they thinking?

Th is wasn’t the only such party that weekend. A similarly themed event was hosted by white students at Tarleton State University near Fort Worth, Texas. Days later, law school students at the University of Connecticut threw a “Bullets and Bubbly” hip-hop party. And these were just the most recent in a series of such parties occurring on col- lege campuses across the country over the past few years.¹ Th e emblems whites sported in each setting were the same—do-rags, gold chains, baggy pants, puff y coats, and dark shades. Th ey fl aunted bottles of malt liquor and fl ashed gang signs. Hadn’t they heard about the controversy months earlier when a fraternity at Johns Hopkins hosted a “Halloween in the Hood” party, or when the University of Colorado Ski and Snow-

1 From Gangsta Parties to the Postracial Promised Land A Year of Race Stories

2 A Year of Race Stories

board Club had to cancel their “gangsta party” because of complaints about racial stereotyping? Th ey must have also missed the stir over a similar frat party at Baylor or the cancelled “ghetto party” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Texas A&M.

Th e pattern is remarkably similar in each setting. White kids adorn themselves with charged symbols from their media-saturated lives and parade about in gleeful amusement. Someone takes pictures and posts them online. Th e images circulate and protests follow, condemning white racism. And in each case, the whites who face the ordeal of public condemnation express a similar sense of confusion and deep regret. Th e apologies that follow each explosion of outrage convey a common senti- ment. As a Clemson student explained on Charleston’s local WCSC TV news report on January 30, 2007, “We weren’t trying to be racial or any- thing.” Several Clemson students circulated a letter of apology stating, “We invited all races and types of people and never meant any racial harm.” But even if it was not an all-white aff air, how could they think that such images are not “racial”? Th eir surprise and befuddlement over being caught up in a racial incident—a common feature of the stories in this book—refl ect an increasing confusion over what is “racial” and how such assessments are made. Th ese stories refl ect the inevitability of be- ing racial, the relentless signifi cance of race, and the insuffi ciency of our cultural conventions to ever fully contain that signifi cance.

White students’ confusion in the wake of such parties is an indi- cation that the conventions by which we decide something is racial are changing rapidly. In cultural terms, we rely on a set of social conven- tions to contain the riotous meaningfulness of race. But these expecta- tions and assumptions—concerning who can say what about race, for instance, or, more crucially, what people must not say about race—are themselves in fl ux. Th is is partly because the line between public and private, which long maintained conventional notions about race, is rap- idly shifting. Th ough national media, from Fox News to the Washing- ton Post, reported these stories as a trend rattling college administrators and opening up a disturbing view onto racial aspects of campus life, the deeper story here is that the public sphere for talking about race has greatly expanded. Th anks to such social networking sites as Face- book—and critical Web sites like Th e Smoking Gun, where party pic-

A Year of Race Stories 3

tures were posted after they were removed from Facebook—once private settings, like these parties, are thrust into public space, opening up new ground for talking about why and how race matters. Rather than simply revealing well-hidden forms of covert racism, this shift highlights the instability of conventions that mold Americans’ selective views of what counts as racial.

Media race stories in the year that followed the Clemson party refl ect a reconfi guring of race in the public sphere. Don Imus’s dramatic fall from his media throne is credited to an online posting of a video of his off ending remarks about “nappy-headed hos.” Th e massive civil- rights protest in Jena, Louisiana, resulted from the rise of the “black blogosphere,” which both circulated news of events in that tiny town and provided a medium for organizing protestors from across the na- tion. In retrospect, the gangsta parties can be seen as just the fi rst wave in a long series of incidents in which Americans have confronted a host of new examples of the continuing impact and importance of race. Each has been marked by some combination of confusion and certainty, of outrage and obliviousness, as private or local moments have been ex- amined intensely in a national framework. Th is shift in audience from private to public—thanks to the many new means for electronically cir- culating remarks and images—has provoked a change in how we talk about race. Th is shift in the spotlight has not so much revealed a hidden set of white opinions about race; rather, it has caught whites in awkward moments when they traffi c in signifi ers previously coded black—from Imus’s word choice to the symbols whites adorn themselves with in the gangsta parties—but that have come to permeate “mainstream” dis- course in the United States.

Th e white kids at these parties were playing with powerful sym- bols that have crossed bounded, racially segregated worlds to pervade American popular culture. Th eir use of these images—once free and easy—was drastically challenged, not simply by a “black community,” but by campus-wide mobilizations that decried their impact on the pub- lic sphere in general. But is this playing with hip-hop imagery—which feeds on Americans’ long romance with gangsters—inherently a racist act? Black students commenting on the parties were not entirely sure. Where some saw racism, others recognized a clumsy manipulation of

4 A Year of Race Stories

pervasive, highly commodifi ed images. Harold Hughes, a member of a black fraternity at Clemson, noted that white students “see this on MTV and BET, they think it is cool to portray hip-hop culture.”² But another student—Ranniece McDonald, a black junior quoted on Fox News on February 2, 2007—remarked, “they didn’t know that they were being racist. It’s really sad.” Th e uncertainty over their possible racial intent stems from the source of the imagery in question. Th e cultural realm of symbolic gestures and rituals presents a diff erent kind of terrain for challenging race than that of affi rmative action, job discrimination, or housing segregation.

Partly because of legislative and judicial accomplishments stem- ming from the civil rights movement, Americans increasingly discuss race in terms of cultural matters. In these discussions, hip-hop claims a central role. Commenting on the apparent failure of Bill Clinton’s “national conversation on race” in the late 1990s, Jason Tanz, in Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America, as- serts that “the conversation has not ended: instead, it has been coded into beats and rhymes. Many of the most important race-related discus- sions of the last two decades have concerned hip-hop music directly: anti-Semitic statements attributed to a member of the rap group Public Enemy in 1989; the 1992 controversy over ‘Cop Killer,’ a song by Ice-T . . . ; the criticism by presidential candidate Bill Clinton of Sister Soul- jah; the fl ap in 2001 over the rap CD made by Cornel West.” In each of these instances and more, Tanz writes, “white America’s” relation to hip-hop “shows us how the old racial verities of the 1960s and ’70s have transformed, and provide a fruitful avenue through which to examine a complicated and confusing new world.”³ In this new world, appearances can be disorienting: When a white kid drapes himself in gangsta apparel at a hip-hop theme party, is this kid racist or just someone who imbibes and idolizes aspects of this public image?

Gangsta parties are a good jumping-off point for examining the complicated dynamics of race because the questions they raise do not have clear-cut answers. Th e white students addressing the news cameras convey this lack of clarity through their utter befuddlement that play- ing with stereotyped images from the much-hyped realm of gangsta rap could be considered off ensive. An unidentifi ed white student—only his

A Year of Race Stories 5

hands were depicted on the screen because he feared harassment—ex- plained to viewers on January 30, “We have a lot of theme parties where we just dress up and try to have fun. And we decided that we’d do a gangsta party.” On the same local WYFF TV news report in Greenville, South Carolina, a black student who attended the party described how the mood at the themed event quickly shifted when one guy showed up in blackface. “It escalated after those gentlemen came in. And, it just kinda turned . . . it was palpable, the emotion that was there. And people just left.” Would the party have caused a racial incident if those white guys who made the “minstrelsy” angle emphatic had not shown up?⁴ Like many such themed events today—such as “80s” and “90s” music parties or other stylized themes—it would have probably passed without notice.

Whites taking up hip-hop imagery can alternately represent, as Tanz argues, an urge to overcome historical and current separations based on race or “a fantasy that equates garden-variety suburban alien- ation with the struggles of ghetto life.”⁵ Th ese contrasting ways of in- terpreting the same gesture involve more than uncertainty regarding the individual beliefs and intentions of particular whites. Th ey refl ect changing conventions around “real” and “authentic” experience that are notably keyed to race but not entirely reducible to it.⁶ Th e indetermi- nacy stems from the possibility that such gestures may refl ect not cer- tain racial values and ideals but rather a fumbling eff ort to make sense of how and why race matters. Yet, even as what counts as racial today grows unclear, news stories depict “racial” incidents as fairly obvious and straightforward, encouraging people to participate in emphatic judg- ments about the contradictory and confusing aspects of race.

In Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America, Bakari Kitwana reads whites’ interest in hip-hop as refl ecting two seemingly antithetical aspects of American life today. One, not surprisingly, is the impact of black popu- lar culture, but the other stems from the role whites play in producing and marketing hip-hop music. “Th e Black presence in popular culture,” Kitwana writes, “has changed the way Americans engage race, especially for a generation of young people who have lived their entire lives with such access.” Th e terms of popular cultural literacy now are often coded

6 A Year of Race Stories

black. At the same time, “the white infl uence is so great in the hip-hop industry that it would be unnatural and odd, almost freakish, if the fi - nal product didn’t appeal to white youth” (emphasis in quoted material is mine unless otherwise indicated).⁷ Young whites are not just intensely subject to the marketing of this music, they recognize in it something uncannily familiar.

Th is recognition refl ects a generational fault line in the signifi - cance of race.⁸ In Kitwana’s view, “hip-hop is a framework, a culture that has brought young people together and provides a public space they can communicate within unrestricted by the old obstacles.”⁹ Clearly this is exhilarating but also greatly unsettling. One year after the party at Clemson, South Carolina returned to center stage in the nation’s con- versation on race; Barack Obama’s major primary victory there, buoyed by young voters, seemed to herald the triumph of his campaign’s theme of transcending racial diff erence. Sounding much like Kitwana, Obama told the audience that night in late January—after a week of heated campaigning marked by a public battle over the legacy of Martin Lu- ther King Jr.—“It is a choice not between black and white, but a choice between the past and the future.” Th is gesture cued a shift in conven- tions governing public images of race. In that moment, South Carolina’s image was no longer primarily defi ned by fi ghts over the Confederate fl ag or Strom Th urmond’s fi erce defense of racial segregation. Instead, it seemed to stand for a dramatic new possibility of the nation’s fi rst Afri- can American president.

Th is is how our conversation on race goes: in fi ts and starts, with scenes that lurch suddenly from seeming hackneyed to appearing quite novel. Th e pop-cultural domain has become Americans’ preferred ter- rain to think about race because it off ers just such images—familiar, yet capable of generating new meanings and implications, where scenes of shocking stupidity and off ensiveness might be set in a diff erent light, as audiences and frames of reference shift. Th ese shifting scenes reveal how much we rely on cultural conventions to keep from appearing to be “racial.” Yet the instability of those conventions—as the line between public and private is redrawn, as generations change, shifting the frames of reference we bring to bear upon them—keeps supplying impressions to the contrary. We work at making sense of race using media stories because they are the most tangible and vivid. Th ey are also the most

A Year of Race Stories 7

confusing and changeable. How Americans make sense of race through this charged cultural material is the subject of this book.

What Counts as Racial?

Race is a fact of everyday American life. Wherever we turn, we see it on each other’s faces, and we typically sort ourselves by color where we live, work, and play. We do race when we socialize or consume, but usu- ally in ways we hardly notice.¹⁰ Race is so routine for us we are largely unconscious of the pervasive conventions guiding our actions, words, and perceptions. Against the backdrop of these highly conventional and seemingly unremarkable ways of “doing” race, we label only a few no- table events or encounters as “racial.” Of the myriad ways whites, blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other groups interact in this country, a mere handful of comments or actions are characterized as being about race. In these moments, the subtexts and assumptions we rely on to get through daily life with minimal confusion and stress jump front and center. Generally, such instances confi rm what “everybody” already knew or believed about race. But there are moments, too, when describ- ing a situation as “racial” highlights, rather, how much these shared conventions and meanings are shifting.

Two primary ways of evaluating the signifi cance of race stand out at this moment. First, there are the ways it creates disparate life chances, disadvantaging primarily blacks and Latinos through various forms of discriminatory practices (particularly in the spheres of housing, jobs, and access to credit), and, by extension, advantaging whites. Th is is the principal way, in terms of progress and policy, that we address—or al- ternately eff ace and ignore—race. But there is also another dimension to race, a cultural one that is not as clear cut and often more diffi cult to assess. Race, simply, is meaningful, and meaning, as we know, is often unruly and irresolute, barely constrained by intention or referentiality. Th ough we may strive to equate race singularly with issues of racism— which Americans widely accept to be a social and moral failing—we keep confronting the fact that the boisterous meaningfulness of race of- ten makes it ambiguous and diffi cult to grasp. A few examples illustrate this predicament.

Across the U.S. South, “Canadian” has recently emerged as a code

8 A Year of Race Stories

word for black, surfacing in the talk of white sales clerks, the banter of white waitresses, and even in comments of a white Houston district attorney, who referred to black jurors as “some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant.”¹¹ Th is is just one instance of the many endlessly inventive ways that some whites fi nd for skirting the conven- tions against racist speech in the United States by fi nding “code words” that mask their racial animus. Th e Racial Slur Database, an online reference source, off ers many more examples, including derivations of “Canadian” into “Coonadian,” and “Canigger.” However, this same growing social awareness of or sensitivity to the potential signifi cance of race has also led to people fi nding racial meanings even where they were not intended. “Niggardly,” for example—a word with Norwegian roots, meaning stingy—has been practically driven from public discourse be- cause of its resonance with a certain racial epithet.

More strikingly, the astronomical term “black hole” has even been rendered suspect. A recent discussion among Dallas County commis- sioners was abruptly halted when a white commissioner, Kenneth May- fi eld, remarked that the county ticket collections agency “has become a black hole” because so much paperwork was being lost in the offi ce.¹² Commissioner John Price and Judge Th omas Jones, both black, im- mediately expressed outrage over the comment and demanded an apol- ogy for his “racially insensitive analogy.” Mayfi eld’s protestations that the phrase had nothing to do with race fell on deaf ears. Th is form of heightened awareness to the potential for racial meanings is fundamen- tal to how Bill Clinton’s use of “fairy tale” during the New Hampshire primary—in relation to Barack Obama’s purported stance in opposition to the Iraq war—could be seriously considered as a racial remark.

Th ese contrary glimpses of the signifi cance of race—either mask- ing racial hate with code words or anticipating fi nding it potentially in any utterance—frame some of the challenges we face in grasping what counts as racial today. Th ese opposed orientations induce a state of “racial paranoia,” as characterized by John L. Jackson. Th is condition, Jackson explains in Racial Paranoia: Th e Unintended Consequences of Po- litical Correctness, emerges from the “ambiguous and nonfalsifi able sense of racial distrust at the heart of the new reality of race in America.”¹³ Jackson does not see this paranoia as race-specifi c; rather, it “delineates

A Year of Race Stories 9

something essential about how all Americans confront social diff erence in their lives.”¹⁴ Indeed, this condition is schizophrenic as well. “We continue to commit to [race’s] social signifi cance on many levels, but we seem to disavow that commitment at one and the same time. Race is real, but it isn’t. It explains social diff erence, but it couldn’t possibly. Th is kind of racial doublethink drives us all crazy, makes us so suspi- cious of one another, and fans the fl ames of racial paranoia. Nothing is innocent, and one bumps into conspirators everywhere.”¹⁵ Th at is, the meaningfulness of race is outstripping the social conventions Americans have devised to contend with its unruly potential. Th is is one of the reasons we fi nd media stories about race to be so fascinating: they off er society-wide opportunities to debate and evaluate what counts as racial these days.

But this eff ort is further complicated by increasing uncertainty over the role and extent of racism today. Is it still pervasive and unchanging, or is it fi nally gradually dissipating? Th e obvious way of framing this uncertainty is through the gap between the remarkable and impressive political ascendancy of Barack Obama and the enduring forms of ra- cial inequality in housing, hiring, and health—on one side, an inspiring image; on the other, a source of infamy for this country. But so many instances and situations that might be characterized as refl ecting racism fall in between these starkly contrasting representations. Th ese are fea- tured in Richard Ford’s Th e Race Card: How Bluffi ng About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse. Ford examines accusations of racism from a quiz- zical stance, taking “an unsentimental look at such claims, defending those that deserve sympathy, scrutinizing those that deserve suspicion, and ridiculing those that deserve contempt.” He approaches claims of racism in major media stories by asking a set of basic questions: “When are complaints of prejudice valid and appropriate and when are they ex- aggerated, paranoid, or simply dishonest?”¹⁶ Th is stance regards charges of racism as rarely transparent and, at times, as potentially calculated. Ford’s work makes plain that, in confronting the possible role or pres- ence of racism, we are increasingly called on to be savvy interpreters and analysts of how, when, and why race matters.

My approach, which builds on the work of Jackson and Ford, ex- amines the cultural conventions by which we evaluate potentially racial