What is the distinction between the words "discriminate" and "discrimination?" After all, if a discriminating palate amounts to having good taste, how is it that those accused of racism are accused of discriminating against a certain group? "Indeed, it is the very thing of all things that [racists] cannot, by definition, manage," argues Christopher Hitchens. "A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen. The 'out' groups are all made up of generalised amalgams and there can be no exceptions."
That point is made by Hitchens in a column for The Guardian under the headline: "Martin Amis is no racist." You may recall that the novelist Martin Amis, a professor of English at the University of Manchester, and Terry Eagleton, a literary theorist there, got into a bit of a scrap a few weeks back, when Eagleton wrote that Amis holds views on Islam similar to those of a "British National Party thug." Eagleton then turned his scorn to Kingsley Amis, Martin's father, declaring him "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals."
The impetus for Hitchens's spirited defense of his close friend Martin Amis is a recent essay in which Ronan Bennett argues that Amis's views "are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness."
Bennett continues:
I can't help feeling that Amis's remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines.
"And I can't help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.
To the blogger and novelist Mark Sarvas, Hitchens's "predictably asinine" response to Bennett merely underscores "what a caricature he's become."
Sarvas continues: Hitchens "has been irredeemably and irretrievably twisted by world events and has drowned in his own Kool-Aid. The greatest loss is that, for all his considerable gifts, he can no longer persuade. He aims his salvos to the like-minded rabble in the cheap seats, and walks off the stage patting himself on the back for his cleverness without converting a single mind."
