sound and fury, signifying nothing
by Karen Sosa
Published: April 15, 2008
Can anyone give me a succinct description of the Democratic primary race since Texas and Ohio? Anybody? William Faulkner?
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Ah, thank you Faulkner. A+.
This is why people who hate politics hate politics. It’s hard to be a person who loves politics at a time like this. With such a range of national problems on the table, Democrats choose, instead, to get into furious, fruitless battles over supposedly elitist statements that weren’t really elitist and supposedly racist statements that weren’t really racist.
Enough has been said about Obama’s true, yet ill-advised commentary on Pennsylvania sociology. Fortunately, just as The Huffington Post’s nearly uniformly anti-Hillary bloggers were running out of steam on the subject, a Republican representative from Kansas gave us a new topic to blog to exhaustion. (So here I go.)
On Barack Obama, Kansas Representative Geoff Davis said today, “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.”
And thus, a new entry in the “Times Race Was Made An Issue When It Really Didn’t Need To Be an Issue in This Campaign” list was born. A politics blog on the Los Angeles Times’ website calls the statement “instantly racially-charged, unacceptable and reminiscent of a time in America that fortunately is slipping from the memory of most. Boy, aren’t you glad you’re not some immigrant trying to learn all the irregular meanings for the little word ‘boy’?”
Well, I’m a native-born, English-speaking American, but I’m having a little trouble here myself.
First, “boy” as a label is, of course, pejorative. Yet, though it may be a relic to a columnist in downtown Los Angeles, it is still widely used in the South, amongst blacks and whites alike. While it once played a role in the racially-stratified context of slavery, the word is not in the same class as “colored,” “negro” and other such words because it is not, in and of itself, race-related in any way. It is pejorative, and Rep. Davis certainly was being pejorative. But his patronization was based on Obama’s age and relative inexperience, not on his race. This distinction is made particularly clear by the fact that Rep. Davis called him “that boy,” not “Boy” as in, “Boy, you need to do some learnin’ before you can run the place.” Parsing words, am I? Splitting lexical hairs? Well, that seems to be the name of the game these days. If we’re going to parse, let’s parse completely.
That the statement is being viewed as “instantly racially-charged” reflects far more negatively on the reflexive reactors getting so hot under the collar over this than it does on Rep. Davis. Like that zit on your face no one notices until you say “Ugh, this zit is so huge, isn’t it?” Rep. Davis’ statement had no racial slant until someone said “That statement is racist. Don’t you think that’s racist?”. Sure, if we want to, we can read race into anything.
I can’t figure out why on earth we want to.
People cannot continue to lament the race problem in this country, crying out for a solution while only contributing to it with their extremely racially-based speech censoring. Pejorative things will continue to be said about Barack Obama by his opponents. His candidacy will be criticized as being all fluff by people other than Geraldine Ferraro. That some members of the Democratic party are so actively seeking to find racial undertones in these criticisms is harmful to race relations in this country, it is harmful to Barack Obama’s candidacy, and ultimately it will be harmful in the general election. It is not hard to envision many of those now-famously embittered blue-collar voters thinking they don’t want to have to spend four years monitoring every word they say about Barack Obama for fear of being labeled a racist.
With such a long run up to Pennsylvania, is makes sense that the primary campaign should become a little stagnant. And with the Clintons on one side and a hefty number of knee-jerk liberals on the other, this sort of pettiness over ill-advised but not ill-intentioned public statements is not surprising. It is just very, very disappointing.
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April 16th, 2008 at 12:39 am
but don’t you have to take into account the fact that Geoff Davis is Obama’s age? When I think of the non-offensive (or at least less-offensive) ways “boy” can be used, it is in the context of age–an old man referring to his inexperienced successor, perhaps. But in this case, the difference between Davis and Obama is less than 36 months, so doesn’t that raise questions about the racial side of “boy” as it has historically been used to address uppity blacks?
April 16th, 2008 at 12:43 am
also, i feel compelled to note that in the same speech, Davis said that Obama was the type of person who would likely spend many years in jail if he wasn’t a politician.
Davis later apologized for the “boy” comment, writing:
“On Saturday night I gave a speech in which I used a poor choice of words when discussing the national security policy positions of the Presidential candidates. I was quoted as saying “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.”
“My poor choice of words is regrettable and was in no way meant to impugn you or your integrity. I offer my sincere apology to you and ask for your forgiveness.
“Though we may disagree on many issues, I know that we share the goal of a prosperous, secure future for our nation. My comment has detracted from the dialogue that we should all be having on legitimate policy differences and in no way reflects the personal and professional respect I have for you.”
April 16th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
If Davis’ speech included the jailbird line then “boy” was racist. It’s hard to believe though, that “boy” would make headlines while “jail” flies under the radar.