Yet another setback for the right on race relations

February 7, 2007

Stephen Colbert has a funny bit he’s been doing for a long while about his only “black friend.” He had one, but they had a falling out (the friend attended an anti-war protest), which led Colbert to encourage black people in his audience to contact him, auditioning for the role of being his new black friend.

It’s all very amusing, of course, because people don’t actually think this way, or at a minimum, they’re not supposed to. Colbert’s joke suggests he has some kind of semi-formal quota system in place — he’s conscious enough to know that he wants a racially-diverse set of friends (if he had no black friends, he’d presumably be racist), but for Colbert, one black friend should do the trick.

For all the times that I’ve laughed at Colbert’s bit, it never occurred to me that the right-wing blowhards he is mocking actually agree with Colbert’s conservative persona when it comes to race and their personal relationships.

On the February 5 edition of his CNN Headline News program, Glenn Beck explained to White Guilt (HarperCollins, May 2006) author Shelby Steele why he thinks he — Beck — doesn’t “have a lot of African-American friends”: “I think part of it is because I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation, and I would say something that somebody would take wrong, and then it would be a nightmare.”

Additionally, on the February 5 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, in a conversation about President Bush’s description of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as “articulate,” host Bill O’Reilly told Temple University education professor Marc Lamont Hill: “Instead of black and white Americans coming together, white Americans are terrified. They’re terrified. Now we can’t even say you’re articulate? We can’t even give you guys compliments because they may be taken as condescension?”

Think Progress had the video clips, which are well worth watching, if only to see just how absurd Beck and O’Reilly are on the issue.

I’d have to say Beck’s remarks were the more ridiculous of the two, in part because they reflect a more intentional racism.

Here’s the exact quote from Beck’s program:

“You know, I — Shelby, I don’t know if anybody else in the audience — oh, this is just going to be a blog nightmare over the next few days — but let me just be honest and play my cards face up on the table.

“I was thinking about this just last week. I don’t have a lot of African-American friends, and I think part of it is because I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation, and I would say something that somebody would take wrong, and then it would be a nightmare.”

Beck seems aware of the fact that his comments are dumb — otherwise, the remarks wouldn’t be a “blog nightmare” — but he explains his position anyway.

To hear Beck tell it, he’s consciously considering race when weighing whether to be friends with someone. He explains his lack of African-American friends, not because he doesn’t know a lot of black people, but because he’s “afraid” he’d say something offensive.

Putting aside exactly what Beck might be saying in casual conversation that’s going to offend a racially diverse audience, his comments reflect a different problem: he’s choosing not to have a lot of black friends. It’s intentional. He could have more black friends, but he doesn’t want to, because he suspects he’d offend them.

Every few months, I see yet another article about how the right is going to turn the tide and start appealing to more African-American voters. And then, every few months, clowns like Beck and O’Reilly pop up and remind us why the efforts consistently fail.

Well, there is an assumption there that there are plenty of African-Americans who’d be happy to be friends with Beck if he’d only choose to have them. Yeah, and no doubt there are scads of lonely Muslims who’d love to pal around with Beck if he’d just get over his hangups about untermenschen.

  • because he suspects he’d offend them.

    Not because he cares about their feelings, but because of the trouble it’ll allegedly cause him.

    Of course, CNN being what it is these days, he’s probably get a raise to reflect his surge in ratings.

  • “White Americans are terrified” – O’Lielly

    “I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation” – Beck

    “The toughest muscle has been known to tremble before an imaginary fear” – Gandhi

  • There’s another kind of implication that O’Reilly and Beck don’t seem to realize they’re making: that all of the (white) friends they *do* have are perfectly willing to let pass any offensive remarks that slip out. It’s not only, “I don’t have black friends because I might inadvertently say something that’s racist,” it’s also, “. . .and none of my white friends would care if I said something racist, so I’m safe.” What an us-versus-them mentality. You’re only going to be offended by a racist remark if you’re a member of the targeted race.

  • I don’t know, maybe the right is trying to make a little move to slough off some of the racist image. Maybe they’re trying to hide in plain sight by pre-emptively ‘explaining’ things about themselves others could take as evidence of racism; “I don’t have black friends but it’s your fault because black guys have chips on their shoulders.” It’s plausible, even- nobody stays friends with people they can’t get along with (not because of their race, I’m saying)- but it may have sounded bad when Beck delivered the lines (because he’s really racist?). Just my thought.

  • Jeezus…

    What I’ve loved about SC’s “Black” “friend” is how he always emphasizes BLACK the same way many boneheads play it. But KCinDC says it best. Why would any black person (or any sane person for that matter) want to be his friend?

    I’ve stopped hanging out with a few folks when I was referred to by them as their “Asian” friend. Does the fact that I have a yellowish tinge to my skin and almost black hair make me some kind of token friend? It’s insulting and patronizing.

    Problem is that I get that sometimes from less enlightened fellow Koreans which annoys me greatly as well. The comment/question, “you have WHITE friends?” has pissed me off just as much as being the “Asian” friend. Of course this goes to show that racism/tribalism is a human thing, not isolated to one particular group.

    As far as I’m concerned, if he/she is your friend then it doesn’t matter what race they are.

  • Now all the right wing guys who watch these guys have gotten a tip. If anyone ever starts to seem like they think you’re racist, mention that the reason you don’t have a lot of black friends is because they all have chips on their shoulders. Black peoples’ self esteem has been so beat down by a lot of the media and its images that they just might be more ready to believe that a guy who says this is more likely to be non-racist and sincere than racist and deceptive. It’s a problem but race relations are ust not simple.

  • Beck and O’Reilly are the kind of people that want to spout off without consequence, and they hide behind the MO of eliminating political correctness. What they really want is to rid themselves of the lessons every mother tells their kid, that discretion is the better part of valor. Sadly for them, that requires the time and thought to carefully consider what to say and how to say it in order to make any idea or concept palatable to anyone’s ear. The great tragedy is that that sort of wisdom has been unjustifiably lumped together with the ills of political correctness by the right wing basketcases who lack discretion and foresight.

  • there’s a reason why bush trots out his adopted mexican brother at each election. of course the kid disappears immediately after the election. he’s the official hispanic token.

  • Tokens? Beck-boy and O’Lielly are tokens. If I stick enough of those Reich-clan tokens together on a string, I’d have something similar to a “wampum belt.”

    But wampum was an exchangeable commodity in its day; it had value. Beck-boy and O’Lielly do not….

  • None so blind….

    Elites, on whatever dimension and no matter how trivial their claim (being born “white”?!), seldom realize what assholes they are when viewed by relative non-elites.

    This is because the non-elites have learned to do their laughing (and crying) in private or in the company of other non-elites, if for no other reason than to avoid providing fodder for the bigoted fools to flatter themselves.

    I very much doubt Beck or O’Reilly could spent one minute, let alone an entire evening, in a working class black bar. If they can’t do that, they may claim a token black acquaintance, but they most certainly have no black friends.

  • I think that Beck, O’Reilly, and their ilk are lacking in the empathy department. Here’s what I might say to O’Reilly, given the chance: I like your work, Bill. You’re a good, sober commentator. You need not apply yourself to thinking through hard questions; answers come as easily as falling down. I wonder if he’d feel complimented, or if he might sense some old stereotypes being brought up to his detriment?

  • It’s a strange position I find myself in as a white liberal today. Probably because of where I live (Northern NJ, as opposed to the midwest somewhere) and my social class (Mom and Dad were the first generation in my family to go to college), I’ve had a lot of friends who weren’t white through almost all of my school career. My pre-school teacher was an African American woman and my first friend in the First Grade was a Jewish kid. For her whole professional career my mom has been an elementary school teacher of classes of almost uniformly African American kids in Jersey City. There aren’t many Italians in my family, and there are no Jews, but my cousis, a half-Irish half-Polish guy named Gallagher married a Puerto Rican woman years ago, and on the other side of my family a couple people have married Hispanics. After we moved from Bayonne to Edison (when I was still very young), my brother and I would walk to latchkey/after-school program every day after elementary school with a couple of Haitian kids we went to school with; we weren’t friends or anything but our parents just worked it out that we’d walk together because I guess they figured we were going the same way and it was better that kids walk together. For years friends of mine in Edison who lived within a few houses of me were a couple Chinese kids, cousins to each other, whose family owns a Chinese restaurant around the corner. In elementary school and middle school, the black guys I went to school were sweethearts with the white girls I grew up with. As a teenager, I took karate for years at a school with many African American men and Indians. I’ve literally fought African American guys and Indian guys in sparring matches dozens if not hundreds of times. Probably about half of the women I’ve dated have not been white and the first girl I ever took out on a date was Filipino. My friends in two years of Catholic high school were mostly Filipino and the schools I went to for my undergraduate and law school education (New Jersey City University and Rutgers-Newark School of Law) were extremely diverse. At Middlesex County College, where I got my Associate’s Degree before moving on to NJCU, probably my best friend was an African American guy I would practice martial arts with. At NJCU my best friend was a guy whose race I don’t even know for sure; I think he was half-black and half-Filipino. At NJCU I practically lived off of meals I bought from a lunch truck that Latino guys worked in.

    For all of it, if a person who wasn’t white talked to a rabid conservative who knew about my life, would the conservative try to make me sound as if I’m a Starbucks loving, latte sipping, detached liberals who avoids all contact with colored people because they’re not white? Maybe they would. I don’t know if that kind of description fits better on other liberals who read this blog, but it sure isn’t me.

    It’s too bad the conservatives are trying to turn all this race stuff around now.

  • An undercurrent to Beck and O’Reilly’s comments is their victim complex. Always an empathy builder with their followers, their attitude that this world is so hard on white bigots just because they’re prejudiced and because this nation is so politically correct bigotry is no longer considered a healthy attitude. Woe is them. Can’t a white bigot catch a break, like Beck alludes, because when his inner a**hole comes out in a social setting he might just look like the simplistic fool he is. Maybe Alan Keyes will be your Black Friend and let you cry on his shoulder, and you can even ask him how his crack business is coming and if you can haves some of his fried chicken and watermelon.

  • I’m sure black people everywhere are breathing sighs of relief knowing that Beck won’t be their friend. Besides, he’s probably right and would say something offensive. If only us whitey’s had the same excuse to avoid that jackass.

  • Translation: “Black people scare me because I just know they’re all crack-smoking savages who can’t wait to shoot me, take my woman and steal my car! Mommy, I wet my pants!”

    Fuck. You.

    And I wonder if Beck has any friends of any colour. (imaginary and inflatable ones don’t count)

  • What petorado said. These guys thrive on whining about how persecuted they are, just like the church ministers do. Of course it’s a load of crap, and a reflection of their desire to go back to the fifties when life was good and there weren’t any dirty hippies screwing everything up.

    Whah…

  • “It’s too bad the conservatives are trying to turn all this race stuff around now.”

    That’s true Swan, but I doubt they’ll succeed. The only way that would work is all of us “tinted” varieties don’t use our brains.

    We humans can sense fear and discomfort very well. If a guy isn’t comfortable around black folks tries to hang out with black folks, they’re going to avoid him for that reason regardless of whatever views or intentions they have. In a previous job, I worked with a team of guys who mostly came from Guyana and I enjoyed working with them. After a couple of beers, one of the guys turned to me and told me that he didn’t mind me because I didn’t get all uptight or tense like a lot of my coworkers did.

    Worst moment of underlying racial tension I ever experienced was in 1998 when I visited a friend down in the OC and ended up at a local Mexican Restaurant. I could cut the tension with the knife when I went in. All I could feel was the patrons glaring at me as if there was some unwritten rule that Asians weren’t allowed to enjoy Mexican food. Being a bit dense and stubborn, I took my time eating there, but I could feel a vibe that I wasn’t all that welcome here. Happy to think that I inadvertently blew some minds.

  • KC, I would never cast aspersions on THAT Wampum—it’s too good of a read, and it has been kind to Mr. Kucinich….

  • My wife, who is Chinese, and I were married 42 years ago in California when many of the state’s “Yellow” laws were still in effect. We suffered through many awkward times and threats in the 60s and 70s, and for a time it seemed as if the racist crowd would be embarrassed and shamed into invisibility.
    Boy were we wrong. The rise of the radical-right, the religious fanatics, the greedy elite, and the reactionary mainstream has served to “legitimize” and reinvigorate covert racists. Beck and O’Reilly are two of that sort. You can smell ’em a mile away.
    They are again making the word “racist” a code and a badge of honor for the right-wing.

  • I don’t have any black friends either, though have several black acquaintances whom I like and who — I hope — like me. But the same goes for white people and Asian people and republicans. You have to have something in common to be friends.

    Back in Poland, I had a very good friend who was a Catholic. And I was her Jewish/atheist token. It all started being very awkward, but we shared a lot of ideas and interests so the relationship developed into real friendship which has survived 40 years and counting. Shrug. It’s what’sinside the head that counts.

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