As anyone can see from a simple cursory glance at my picture, I happen to be black. That shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, though if you’ve only ever heard my voice: trust me, I can understand. Now one of the interesting things about blogging is that I got into it very early and have made it to the point where people know who I am, whether they like me or not. I made a conscious decision early on that I wouldn’t be a “black blogger”, that is I made it clear that I was not going to be the blogger of record on racial issues (there are people much more gifted than I writing such material). Over the 5 years that I’ve written my blog, less than 1/10 of 1% of my writing could be remotely considered an opinion on race. One reason I’ve stayed away from that is that my opinion on issues of race are considerably more conservative and in the minority among black Americans. Let’s just say I share more ideology with Bill Cosby than Michael Eric Dyson. And I don’t want to be the “voice of black America” because quite frankly I’m not.
But that doesn’t change what people will decide to pigeonhole you with anyway. I’ve written two posts about what I think is a clear indictment of the insular and relatively monochromatic world that conservative bloggers inhabit, and the usual cackling from the cons is that I am a racist. I’ve had this idiotic label applied to me before from many of these same folks, and I sort of understand that I should go ahead and talk about these things because even if I may not be in the mainstream of black American opinion on these issues, it sure makes more sense coming from me than a guilt-ridden white liberal.
So yeah, I’ll reiterate – “stuck on stupid” has long been used by black Americans and the giddy school girl novelty that it’s been greeted with in the con world is indicative of their inability to echo beyond the same usual idiotic outlets while slapping each other on the back for being enlightened.
And yes, declaring that being “articulate” is a black politician’s virtue sounds bad regardless of whether the speaker had any racial intent or not. There are too many black professionals and politicians in this country in this day and age to have the fact that they all don’t sound like they come out of the ghetto be treated as a miracle of some sorts. And I’m going to say it.
Oliver –
No need for you to be the “voice of black America” — you do fine just as you are. However, you needn’t feel shy about pointing out things you know well.
On a related note, if you haven’t read Robert George’s (the conservative NY Post writer) blog post about being a black republican considering the rhetorical idiocies of republicans following Katrina, you may want to.
It’s here
Or if the link doesn’t work, here’s the URL.
http://raggedthots.blogspot.com/2005/09/why-am-i-still-republican_19.html
Keep up the good work Oliver.
riffle
Bush = Inarticulate (HAHA)
Steele = Articulate (RACIST!!!)
Yep, makes sense… To Orwell perhaps. (By the way, you’re very articulate as well… unfortunately, the ideas that you so clearly and expressively convey are totally bonkers…. or, to borrow a phrase, Stuck on Stupid.)
Please don’t delete this comment like you’ve deleted all the others. Don’t you like a debate with various points of view?
Oh, and congrats on the Redskins’ win on Monday… ruined my pickem pool.
(Can’t believe you root for that offensively named team…)
Regards,
St Wendeler
If the shoe fits…
With the greatest respect, I’ve always thought of you as the Jessica Alba blogger, and I thank you for that. I try not to be the voice of the trolls, but it is something I know well.
Oh Oliver. How sad.
I mean, I know my post used a lot of big words, but c’mon — even you can see I didn’t call you racist.
In the post, that is. Because clearly you are.
No, instead, what I said — which you’ve described as the “usual cackling” is this:
Disagree with it, but it’s not the “usual” anything — unless the “usual cackling” you refer to is the proliferation of semiotic discussion that is sweeping the blogosphere like a NEOCON WILDFIRE!
stwendeler wrote:
“Bush = Inarticulate (HAHA)
Steele = Articulate (RACIST!!!)
Yep, makes sense& ”
Anyone paying attention for the past few decades would know that “articulate black man” is familiar “damning with faint praise” about black people. It’s the kind of pseudo-compliment that is likely to reveal more about the speaker than the subject of the sentence.
As for whether it “makes sense,” like with other slurs, it doesn’t have to “make sense.” It doesn’t “make sense” that using the N word can get your ass whipped. Nonetheless, I recommend not using it in a group of blacks if you’re not black.
As for the “inarticulate” point about Bush, that illustrates the point. Politicians are supposed to be articulate– finding one, black or white, who is articulate should be hardly noteworthy. So “articulate” applied to “politician” is a generally unneccessary qualifier, like “the catholic pope in the vatican” or “the wet river” or “the feathered sparrow” or “the solar sun.”
A professional politician as inarticulate as Bush is a genuine rarity, and worth commenting on.
To put it more starkly, telling someone “you speak so well for a black person” is not a compliment. The phrase “articulate black man” is often shorthand for that, and I can’t blame blacks for looking askance at white people who reveal how they feel with that phrase.
Let’s let Chris Rock make the point: “Colin Powell can’t be President! Get out! Do you know why Colin Powell can’t be President? Whenever Colin Powell is on the news, white people give him the same compliments: ‘How do you feel about Colin Powell?’, ‘He speaks so well! He’s so well spoken. I mean he really speaks so well!’ Like that’s a compliment, shit.
‘He speaks so well’ is not a compliment, okay? ‘He speaks so well’ is some shit you say about retarded people that can talk. What do you mean he speaks so well? He’s an educated man, how the f**k do you expect to sound? ‘He speaks so well.’ What are you talking about? What voice were you expecting to come out of his mouth? ‘Imma drop me some bomb today’, ‘I be Pwez o dent!’.”
And, if you can’t get that, then no wonder it doesn’t “make sense” to you.
Goldstein, only you could extract words and make such inane commentary. It is the usual cackling from you and your ilk to never address the substance of things, but rather pull out accusations and the like cheered along by a monochromatic echo chamber.
AMEN!
And don’t get me started with the “wow, you don’t sound Puerto Rican”.
ARGH!!!
If you have independent views on matters of race, does that not make you exactly the type of person who should be writing more about those issues? What is “Black America?” and why would it exclude your voice? Is is appropriate for “Black” voices to be unified and monolithic? I say the more, new ideologically diverse voices, the better.
You seem to be stepping out of the fray because you think you’re not “authentically” black on these issues. Instead you’re leaving the bloviating to the monochromatic echo chamber with the PC credentials. Be an individual voice! Take some risks. Get some liberal hate mail going.
As someone who is invested in language and the dissemination of meaning, protein, you can’t write for shit.
Proteinwisdom…
Actually, I pretty much agree with you in theory. But if the purpose of communication is to, well, communicate, then one must consider not only one’s own interpretation of a word or phrase, but also how that word or phrase will be interpreted by the listener. If I wanted to tell an Englishman about how angry I was on Friday, I would probably not tell him that “I got pissed on Friday.”
As an aside, my example was not the best, because I would not hesitate to use the word “niggardly.” A better example would be the phrase, “Some of my best friends are black.” Might be true, but why even bother, given the obvious volume of baggage that goes along with that phrase and the eye-rolling that it is sure to result in the listener?
Someone today used a term that I believe fits the left’s agenda, and I actually encourage the righty tighties to use it….”brilliant”.
Come on Rightys, pass it off asyour own and call us brilliant all day long. See if you do that we both win, you get another buzzword and we get our recognition.
Here’s to Buffalo beating Atlanta this Sunday!
All this whining about a single, misinterpreted word from a guy that once used the word “filthy” to describe a Jew. Odd that your archives seem to stop right before that post, Oliver.
If you remember, I defended you back then, describing your use of that word as an inadvertent slip and not racism. Perhaps you should cut Ed some slack, or perhaps I should go back and describe your words as racist regardless of whether you “had any racial intent or not.”
saying “[Michael Steele] is surprisingly ariculate for a black man”" would be racist… It would also be racist to say “Jeff Goldstein dances suprisingly well for a white guy.” Or, “Michelle Malkin is surprisingly dumb for an Asian girl.” Saying the following is not:
Articulate, knowledgeable, passionate, and humorous, he [Steele] embodies the communication skills of a Ronald Reagan with a keen grasp of policy.
There isn’t a reference to race anywhere in the sentence… and two people are described in the sentence, Michael Steele and Ronald Reagan. I know Ronald Reagan was an old white guy… When I read that sentence on this site, I didn’t even know that Steele was black until Oliver took offense.
It is the usual cackling from you and your ilk to never address the substance of things
The substance of things? You’re kidding right? You’re accusing somebody of being a racist because they described a person as articulate. He also called him ‘knowledgable’, ‘passionate’ and ‘humorous’ and you’re complaining about substance?
GMAFB.
If I wanted to tell an Englishman about how angry I was on Friday, I would probably not tell him that I got pissed on Friday.
Scratch, that’s two different things. Figures of speech obviously do differ. When Brits are surprised about something, they’ll say, “Well blow me!” but that doesn’t happen here.
However, articulate means what it means here and in GB. And implying somebody is racist because you happen to lump a description of articulate along with other compliments upon a Black person is just frigging ridiculous.
Now we know why Oliver is chasing the race angle on this: to obfuscate the fact that one of the alleged credit criminals, Katie Barge is a former employee of Media Matters.
What did Oliver know and when did he know it?
“Articulate” does not mean knowledeable, passionate, or humorous. The one thing these words share in common is that they are positive attributes.
Perhaps you would prefer an Orwellian re-write of the sentence:
“Reagan was articulate, knowledgeable, passionate, and humorous. Steele, unlike Bush, shares all of those qualities.”
Jay…
And implying somebody is racist because you happen to lump a description of articulate along with other compliments upon a Black person is just frigging ridiculous.
Agreed. However, it is not ridiculous to suggest that a person commenting on a political figure who is black should realize that the word “articulate” is loaded.
Just for fun, another example: Imagine an American critic writing about an English actor, “He has striking good looks, with clean, white teeth.” It’s a compliment, but one that for many will call to mind less complimentary remarks about other Englishmen.
Look at the sentence without the “offending” word:
“Knowledgeable, passionate, and humorous, he [Steele] embodies the communication skills of a Ronald Reagan with a keen grasp of policy.”
Reading this version it becomes obvious just how redundant and extraneous the word “articulate” is. It is precisely this rednundancy, born of a subconscious need to over-emphasize Steele’s ability to communicate, that suggests the unconscious motivation for its use: a latent racism that the writer himself may not even be aware of. It’s the unconscious aspects of this that were talking about here. The writer may not be aware at all of the racist assumptions that structure his thinking — neither are most of us for that matter — and hence his writing. For all protein’s jargon-addled efforts to explain the “structural” aspects of language, he overlooks this essential point: We cannot step outside of language just as we have no means of controlling or influencing the deep structures that give rise to it.
Reading this version it becomes obvious just how redundant and extraneous the word articulate is. It is precisely this rednundancy, born of a subconscious need to over-emphasize Steele s ability to communicate, that suggests the unconscious motivation for its use: a latent racism that the writer himself may not even be aware of.
That’s nonsense. Ted Kennedy is knowledgable, but he’s about as articulate as a 5 year old with a mouth full of marbles. In addition, comparing his communications skills with that of Reagan, still doesn’t make Ed’s statement redundant. Communication skills are different altogether from being able to arcticulate an argument. An example of that would be Steve Forbes. He was very articulate in describing his vision for America and his support of a flat tax, but his communication skills were poor and he came off sounding robotic, as if he was reading from cue cards.
It is precisely this rednundancy, born of a subconscious need to over-emphasize Steele s ability to communicate, that suggests the unconscious motivation for its use: a latent racism that the writer himself may not even be aware of. It s the unconscious aspects of this that were talking about here. The writer may not be aware at all of the racist assumptions that structure his thinking neither are most of us for that matter and hence his writing.
Frameone, would you describe yourself as a Freudian, a Jungian, or a Mind Melder? Seriously, though, it took you only three sentences to encapsulate the tactic of deconstructionist language theft — yes, I said theft — that Derrida bequeathed to his successors. Now let me put this in layman’s terms — you’ll have to pry my words from my cold, dead fingers. We — and by “we” I mean the electoral-based community — are calling BS on your thievery.
Frameone…
I’m in bizarro world. I’m making the same point as you [mostly] on another site that Oliver linked to. I’ve never posted over there so they assume I’m, you know…one of YOU guys. It feels…weird.
You guys misunderstand. Articulate doesn’t just mean what it means, it also signifes a level of cultural capital that, by and large, goes without saying (unconsciously) when whites speak positively about other white peers. (A white adult might refer to a white adolescent as “articulate,” for instance, but that has much the same patronizing implications as in the case before us here.) Often times, however, when well-meaning whites speak about blacks their conscious desire may be to praise the person but unconsciously they feel a lack in their own use of language born of deep-seeded racist thinking that they themselves may not even be aware of. In the sentence under scrutiny here, Steele’s ability to “use clear, expressive language” that is his ability to communicate, is doubly emphasized in the use of the word “articulate” and the comparison to Reagan. One cannot be inarticulate and a good communicator, neither can one communicate well and be inarticulate. But the larger point is this: Mastery of language, whether you want to call it articulateness or effective communication, connotes a particular level of cultural capital closely tied to power. As such the words used to describe it are carefully guarded and regulated subconsciously.
At any rate, I don’t know why what you still have your panties in a bunch. I’m saying the writer meant well but ultimately fell victim to unconscious structures beyond his control — if not beyond his ability to recognize and correct for.
Now we know why Oliver is chasing the race angle on this…
I must admit to following that diversion. Forgetting for a moment that Oliver is up to his eyeballs in this crime/scandal (kidding, kidding,) a point that I would rather have made is that he let these two “Democratic operatives” get away with a mild “oh, how dumb of them.” A Republican action of the same type would surely have brought disgusted cries of the “they could not possibly sink lower” variety.
Tongueboy –
I might ask you the same questions based solely on your username. Infantalize, much? And the thing that you reactionaries never got and still refuse to understand is that structuralism and deconstructionalism, which it gave rise to, are, in their essence, aimed at uncovering the operation of power in language. It isn’t about “stealing” your words, its about trying to understand the way your words and my words, our shared language, structure the world, indeed, constitute, the world in which we operate. If you experience this effort to understand as a “theft” I can only surmise its because you, as most of us, have a vested interest in the masking of power relations in language. Afterall, it is upon these very power relations that our very identities as social, cultural and political beings rest. Ultimately, what post-structuralism reveals is that, essentially, there is no way out of language. All of us, you, me, Derrida, are trapped within it and the power relations it reinforces. You prefer your captivity. I prefer to keep up the good fight.
Scratch –
Freaky.
Well, I’ve been accused of a lot of things, frameone, but that’s not one of them.
But then, I guess such dross is par for the course from someone who would make the kind of lame, pseudo-intellectual argument as you do, above. That is, you write:
…which of course has the practical effect of suggesting that you, by virtue of your supposed enlightened understanding of language and your predilection for phenomenological interpretation (which to work, needs to ascribe to Ed “unconscious” motivations that you, by virtue of your preternatural ability to tease out hidden cultural dialogics, can identify), are above falling prey to the very forces you claim are informing Ed’s language.
In short, you are intellectually masturbating to the specter of your own assumed cleverness.
It is simply silly to suggest one need be articulate to be a good communicator, as any mime or puppeteer might tell you. And it is doubly silly to suggest that you can see into the soul of whites — or to assume that, because it’s possible to have unacknowledged racialist motivations for choosing certain words, it is likely, or, worse, that it is perfectly fair to assume that such motivations exist simply because the utterer is white.
That is racist. Which, as a diety capable of seeing through to the motivations of others, you should have noticed in yourself.
For what it’s worth, comments on my site aren’t modified. Come on over and make you claims there. Oliver has seen fit to delete several that have appeared here, so the discussion is being hamstrung.
But you seem to believe you’re such a brilliant writer — and that I can’t write a lick — which means you should have no problem showing me up.
Laugh it off, Oliver. I’ve seen weaker conspiracy theories tying Karl Rove to everything from Enron to the Swiftees.
Yeah, that its it. It goes all the way up to Howard Dean, man.
If only Dems were half that diabolical.
Oh, really?
Moribund intentionalism and the death of the author II: The Wrath of Cant
Fresh off of insisting that I write like shit, “frameone,” pontificating at length in ODub’s comments, follows up on yesterday’s discussion of racist sigification by setting us straight:You guys misunderstand. Articulate doesn’…
frameone Says:
September 22nd, 2005 at 1:35 pm
Tongueboy
I might ask you the same questions based solely on your username. Infantalize, much? And the thing that you reactionaries never got and still refuse to understand is that structuralism and deconstructionalism, which it gave rise to, are, in their essence, aimed at uncovering the operation of power in language. It isn t about stealing your words, its about trying to understand the way your words and my words, our shared language, structure the world, indeed, constitute, the world in which we operate. If you experience this effort to understand as a theft I can only surmise its because you, as most of us, have a vested interest in the masking of power relations in language. Afterall, it is upon these very power relations that our very identities as social, cultural and political beings rest. Ultimately, what post-structuralism reveals is that, essentially, there is no way out of language. All of us, you, me, Derrida, are trapped within it and the power relations it reinforces. You prefer your captivity. I prefer to keep up the good fight.
Indeed… You are Stuck On Stupid.
Maybe it’s just me (I am sure it is) but isn’t it already getting old?
The whole “Stuck on stupid, te he he he ha ha” thing is lame.
To be totally honest with you, it’s not even that funny. It’s like getting all giddy and exited about someone saying “Shut up”.
Hey everyone on the left, lets all start using this phrase and post all of the exact same pictures and exact same phrases and buzzwords on our websites and we can be just like the right!!
Don’t you wanna grow up to be just like me??!!!?!?!?!
Between understanding and the status qou, the Right will choose the status quo every time.
Teddy Poop, I kinda like that!
I am out for the day, you all have a great night!
Yes, Teddy Poop… I agree. The phrase is “played”
(Can someone please deconstruct my use of that phrase so I can know whether there’s some power structure in that word or whether I’ve offended someone…)
Jeffy Goldstein is simply engaging in the soft bigotry of his own racist universe. It’s the old sports cliche at work; a black player is “athletic” and “physical” while the white player is “smart” and “wily.”
Of course, it is amusing watching Jeffy claim no ones’s ever told him he can’t write “for sh&t.”
The marketplace has been hammering home that very point to Jeffy for years. After all, if one spends over half one’s life in the study of a certain subject–be it architecture, dentistry, or writing—but cannot eke out the barest living from such pursuit—well, the market is telling one something loudly and clearly.
Matt, I am Jewish, so I will say it. What Wolfowitz has done to our country is filthy and obscene. And yeah, that makes Wolfowitz a filthy and obscene individual.
Oh look. Another withering attack from Jadegold, the anonymous troll.
How s the marketplace been treating you, Jadegold? I see you’re playing the high-rent clubs these days. Congrats!
I mean, playing Rudy to Oliver s Fat Albert? Wow. Most people could only dream&
Oh look. Another withering attack from the Jadegold, the anonymous troll.
How’s the marketplace been treating you, Jadegold? I see your playing the high-rent clubs these days. Congrats!
I mean, playing Rudy to Oliver’s Fat Albert? Wow. Most people could only dream…
Protein…
The no-preview posting hurts, doesn’t it?
# frameone Says:
September 22nd, 2005 at 3:05 pm
Between understanding and the status qou, the Right will choose the status quo every time.
Yes, “the Right” is defending the status quo of retirement Ponzi schemes, realpolitik in foreign policy which results in coddling dictators, destructive welfare dependency, oppresive and complex taxation that results in increased ineffeciencies and slower economic growth, etc.
Perhaps you haven’t recognized that since 1994, it’s the Dems that have been standing in the way, shouting “No!” without offering any substantial reforms of these problems on their own. And then you wonder why the Left has trouble at the ballot box.
Regards,
St Wendeler
And yes, declaring that being articulate is a black politician s virtue sounds bad regardless of whether the speaker had any racial intent or not.
So, oDub, you are now agreeing with Lilieks when he called you out for calling Wolfowitz “ filthy?” I seem to recall you were none to happy with what Lilieks said at the time, so what changed your mind?
The marketplace is great, Jeffy. It truly is the land of opportunity for the talented.
How’s the writing biz? Any nibbles from publishers? Not even Regnery….?