(Opinion, cross-posted from Brainstorm)
Paul Krugman has just written a column for The New York Times on race and electoral politics today (using Obama’s electability as its pivot point). He talks specifically about what he characterizes as the upside of political correctness (“that decades of pressure on public figures and the media have helped drive both overt and strongly implied racism out of our national discourse”), which is exactly what my newest book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, flags as a potential downside to PC politics.
Sanitizing public discourse, scrubbing it clean of explict forms of racism, shouldn’t be our national endgame when it comes to dealing with racial differences and race-based hatreds. If anything, it is just a kind of collective repression, which makes everyone much less confident that the conversations they are actually having (about race or across racial lines) are genuine, sincere, and honest.
But I do think that this long, hot summer of McCain v. Obama will have us all talking about racism and politics a lot more than usual, and probably in the very terms that Krugman and I unpack a little differently. I can see his point, but I also don’t think that we should consider hiding racism from public view as an unequivocal victory (or a socio-political finish line) in and of itself.
The Manhattan Institute’s John McWhorter and Brown University economist Glenn Loury engage in a video discussion/debate on whether “racism is over” in American electoral politics. They both seem to say “yes,” but with different degrees of gusto. Loury wants to replace “racism” with “race” (holding onto some form of racialized significance), while McWhorter argues that very little of the stuff that people consider racist is actually racist (or even racial) at all, just general forms of ignorance and mypoia that the label “racism” misinterprets. My local paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, has a front page headline this morning that describes Obama’s biggest challenge as “the comfort factor,” which is (in part) a kind of euphemism or proxy for race, at least as the article goes on to explain it.
Start your engines and buckle up. Most of us are going to be having a heated-up version of this very discussion well into November.
