The Nuremberg Defense of Racist Slurs

I'm sorry, but "I was just joking" is never really a defense when you use racist slurs. And it doesn't make you look like less of an idiot when you use them incorrectly, either:

South Carolina [Republican Jake Knotts] on Thursday called a Republican gubernatorial candidate of Indian descent a "raghead," saying we have one in the White House, we don't need one in the governor's mansion.
...
"If it had been recorded, the public would be able to hear firsthand that my 'raghead' comments about Obama and Haley were intended in jest," Knotts said in his statement. "Bear in mind that this is a freewheeling, anything-goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub. It's like local political version of Saturday Night Live, which is actually where the joke came from."

First, even as bad as SNL has become, I somehow doubt this comparison is worth much. Second, if this is true about SNL originating the joke (which I'm not going to bother to check), it can probably safely be said that they are making fun of the racists, and that is the kind of joke that may be acceptable, if any is.

I'm not really sure why people think "I was just joking" is such a great defense. You're obviously not saying Obama and state Rep. Nikki Haley are literally wearing towels on their heads. And the only people that would think it's "funny" are also racist. So how does this help you?

Tea Partiers Are a Great Model of White Privilege

Tim Wise just wrote a post titled "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black." It's a long thought experiment that pretty well documents the meaning of white privilege, as he explains as the end. Here's a small snippet, but it's worth the read:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Hate Speech and the Tea Party

(updated below)

Another post on language? Is this a theme? Ok, so I think about language a lot, perhaps as intertwined with the general concepts of speech and First Amendment rights. And judging from conservations with all other members of this blog, we'll go back and forth responding to similar ideas. Personally, I really struggle with that line on the First Amendment where hate speech falls - is it an action designed solely to injure? Is it political speech in any sense? Lately I've become more sympathetic to the Critical Race Theory approach, which is that hate speech is particular should be punishable in some way, but I'm still not sure. For all our liberal readers that have not yet explored the radical, Words That Wound is a collection of the seminal critical race essays on the subject, by Mari Matsuda, Kim Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Charles Lawrence III, and well worth the mind-opening read.

Anyway, so this post was prompted by that oh so wonderful new-ish political movement, the Tea Party, and protestors' decisions to call Rep. John Lewis one of the words Jacob says we should have removed from our vocabularies loooong ago, and call Rep. Barney Frank another. I agree completely with Jacob that we need to monitor our own speech and be conscious of the results of it, but the difficulty is in the next step - can law be involved?