Letters to the Editor
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‘The Perils of “Sensitivity”‘
John McWhorter’s argument (Op-ed, “The Perils of ‘Sensitivity,'” August 24, 2006) is misinformed when he suggests that the criticism public figures who’ve engaged in appeals to racial passions and prejudices have, in effect, come from America’s “sensitivity” police. A lack of “sensitivity” was not civil rights icon Andrew Young’s offense or what we accused him of when he opined that black people have been “ripped off” by Jewish, then Korean, and then Arab store owners who have “sold us stale bread, bad meat, and wilted vegetables” and then run off and relocated to Florida. Mayor Young was, as a paid spokesman for Wal-Mart megastores, engaging in not only group-think and snap group judgments but also feeding the stereotype and racial tripe that “black communities” are better off without these cheating Jews, Koreans, and Arabs.
If a store is indeed guilty of such bad business practices, why blame that on the store owner’s ethnicity or religion? What does one have to do with the other? It is exactly that kind of racial rhetoric (not “insensitivity”) that civil rights veterans, including Mr. Young’s mentor, the Reverend Martin L. King, Jr., cautioned against, and what the current generation of civil rights activists must protest and discourage. Indeed, Mr. King during his lifetime never countenanced ethnic polarization as either a marketing strategy or lame or even earnest justification for the expression of ignorant comments and judgments about any person’s actions based solely on his ethnicity or religious affiliation. Rather, Mr. King taught us that we must seek to banish not only inequality of opportunity but also the corrosive and destructive epidemic of base racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices.
Mr. McWhorter’s op-ed also dismissed legitimate criticism of Senator Allen’s resorting to an obvious racial slur, when, at an all-white rally, Senator Allen called out the only brown-skinned man in the room (the videographer for Mr. Allen’s opponent), who is of Indian descent, and referred to the man as a “macaca.” The word “acaca” means monkey, as in “There’s a monkey in this room.” Mr. Allen then followed up his calling out the “macaca” in the room with an accusation about the non-white man being a foreigner. Mr. Allen shouted out, “Welcome to America.” The man is an American. But even if he weren’t, why, other than making a snap and racist judgment about the man’s citizenship based on his appearance alone, on the man’s skin color and ethnic heritage, would the senator from Virginia conclude that he was not an American or even unAmerican? If this be mere “insensitivity,” insensitivity deserves to be made of firmer stuff than to excuse an American senator for calling into question a man’s citizenship based only on his ethnic heritage or appearance alone.
No one pounced upon Senator Allen or Mayor Young in any effort to “stop socio-political discourse dead.” What we in the human decency movement did do was to respond to their racial idiocy.What possibly could be wrong or overly-sensitive about answering such entreaties to bigotry?
MICHAEL MEYERS
Executive Director
New York Civil Rights Coalition
New York, N.Y.
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