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July 18, 2008, 07:14 AM ET
'The View' on Race and the N-Word
A friend sent me a link with an excerpt from ABC’s The View yesterday. It was a segment from the episode where Elisabeth Hasselbeck breaks down a bit during a discussion about race, specifically while debating Whoopi Goldberg on Whoopi’s use of the word “nigger” and over their divergent takes on the best path toward real racial reconciliation.
I would argue (and did, in that C-Span segment I linked to yesterday) that all of our conversations about race (if they are genuine and real and productive) will necessarily include such moments of emotional frustration, exhaustion and excess. They just have to. Anything else is just farce.
Race is not simply a cognitive category with more or less analytical power (as academics are prone to construct it). Race is also an emotionally charged topic/investment, and we suppress that fact at our own peril.
But the only way that such charged discussions can help (bolstering our connectedness as opposed to further balkanizing or alienating us from each other) is if they take place between people who share a modicum of trust in one another’s “good faith” efforts to listen and understand differing points of view.
Ususally, our attempts at honest racial dialogue happen between preachers and their respective choirs or between debaters who only “listen” long enough for them to know when it is their turn at the microphone, at which point their will slyly turn their opponents words against them and “win” the debate.
I, for one, hope that we have more crying and yelling about race on network television, especially since it is such a heavily monitored/scrutinized venue that there is less potential for violent abuse as a function of such heated exchanges.
Of course, we have to be careful that we don’t simply sap the transformative potential of such televised dialogues by reducing them to the next prefabbed generation of Reality TV. But that would still probably best some of that genre’s current fare.
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