Just Words

What do “amateurish,” “singsongy,” and “stale” have in common? Apparently, they all mean brown.

On Feb. 25, replying to the pillories of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s lilting response to President Obama’s address to the nation, blogger Ann Althouse asked, “Why are all these people so confident that they are not manifesting racism?” Thus began another episode of race-card Tourette’s. Though many hoped that such accusatory innuendo would cease with Obama’s election, its metastasis to the right has exposed its severity.

Some of the ridicule directed at Jindal could have been racial, like White House reporter Helen Thomas’s branding of Jindal as “pitiful” before joking about the movie Slumdog Millionaire. But to believe that all of his criticism was racist requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

Jindal’s critics included Fox News correspondent Juan Williams, who called Jindal’s performance “amateurish” and “singsongy,” and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who tagged it “stale.” When listing the many stereotypes attributed to Indian Americans, amateurism, singsong, and staleness seldom come to mind.

How, then, does Althouse defend her groundless claim? The day after her blog post, Althouse crafted this egg-headed explanation of how comparisons of Jindal to country boy Kenneth Parcell of NBC’s 30 Rock were racial: “Instinctively repainting [Jindal] white is—I would say—presumptively racial. To strip away his racial identity—to stereotype him as an especially white white man—is a powerful racial move.”

The desperate mental contortionism employed here to slander Jindal’s bipartisan critics evokes the illogic used during the 2008 presidential election by a cavalcade of left-wing commentators, including Slate’s John Dickerson, The Kansas City Star’s Lewis Diuguid, and author David Shipler. These pundits claimed that nearly every criticism aimed at Obama was a Machiavellian ploy, using subtle wordplay to remind white voters of his blackness—even if this criticism did not reference race at all.

Certainly, there was some undeniable racialism—Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland calling Obama “uppity,” rabid left-winger Ralph Nader referring to him as “Uncle Tom,” and the ever-clever rhymesters at Fox News calling Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama” come to mind. But Dickerson’s assertion that for “a lot of voters... when you talk about experience with respect to Obama, that’s code for people’s continuing uncomfortableness about his race” does not fall into this category. Dickerson offered no evidence to buttress his claim, for there is none.

Worse still was Diuguid’s allegation that calling Obama “socialist” was racist due to J. Edgar Hoover’s labeling of civil-rights icons Martin Luther King, Jr., and W.E.B. Du Bois as such. Just because the long list of individuals smeared as socialist happens to include prominent blacks alongside prominent whites like Franklin Roosevelt and every Democrat since does not make the word racial. Furthermore, the socialism charge was not leveled until Obama told a certain plumber that he wished to “spread the wealth around.” If encrypted racialism was intended, then why wait until this episode to wield it?

The epithet “elitist” also came into currency only when Obama observed that Pennsylvanians are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion,” yet somehow Shipler declared that “‘elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity’”—claiming, ergo, that any word synonymous with a synonym of a racial slur is a racial slur.

All of these words have been used against white politicians in the past. John Kennedy was called inexperienced, and John Kerry elitist and arrogant, for reasons other than blackness. Granted, some words, like “welfare queens” and “busing,” have used blacks as wedges between whites, but the terms “inexperienced,” “socialist,” and “elitist” have no such racial dimension. The truth is that nearly any word can be construed as racial. By labeling every argument against non-white candidates as racist, defenders of Jindal and Obama indicate that all criticism of their candidate is racist and that the only reason not to support him is racism.

Either that, or they are simply exploiting race to insulate their candidate from criticism—but we all know that they would never do that.


Dhruv K. Singhal ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Straus Hall.