Colbert I. King - Why Obama Stands With His Church - washingtonpost.com

This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian."

I am a big supporter (including in print) of political correctness as a means of challenging embedded frames of action but at the same time I'm aware of the processes of entrenchment that will lead to the creation of new frames that will determine much of the public discourse in the future. In other words, political correctness works only for a period of time before it needs a 'refresh'. The history of the appellations of African Americans is one such great example. Going from African to Negro to Black to African American it is now on its second cycle of such a refresh.

An Barack Obama and Rev Wright seem to be victims of one such particular entrenchment.

I've been reading much of the commentary on Obama's speech and collecting quotes in preparation for a conference paper and I was struck by the incessant claims of Wright's racism based on remarks that were so obviously taken out of context. This becomes even more obvious when you listen to the whole sermon. How could anyone think of him as anything else but a courageous leader of his community (who may make the occasional questionable but hardly incendiary remark) is almost inconceivable. Yet, commentator after commentator calls him racist or at least considers his remarks racially inflammatory. The quote above suggests a possible explanation. He uses the word 'black' in a positive affirmative sense. But political correctness has made a positive identification of someone as black a precarious proposition. There are many contexts in which this is acceptable but many in which it is not.

I've worked for an agency that asked its applicants to mark their ethnicity with the option of 'choose not to disclose'. With few exceptions, the majority of the people making that choice were white upper middle class people with an agenda. Most people of color took it in the spirit in which it was intended: 'If we are aware of the diversity of our constituency, we can work harder to try to support it.' If I had a choice I would have asked for sexual and political orientation, too. Sure, in most contexts, none of this should matter, but in others, knowing the make up of one's constituency, is essential. But when some of my Czech students saw a similar diversity questionnaire in the UK, they thought it was racist.

Another illustration was an example given by a black researcher in education of a white parent who was proud of his daughter for taking the more complicated route of choosing the color of a sweater over the color of the skin in pointing out her friend to him at a distance. But such color blindness is an act (brilliantly satirised by Stephen Colbert) and not a reality. But is this public act of color blindness that is the only way to signal belonging to a certain community of values that is available to the white middle-classes. To them, this leads to a puzzling and discomfiting asymmetry of reference. Calling a Church: 'Upper East Side White Congregation' is racist and 'Harlem Black Church' is not! Linguistically, this is nothing strange or unusual. Language is full of such asymmetries (see Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place for examples about the descriptions of women) some working for the benefit of one group or another and some neutral. But the folk theories and the inventory of reactions available in American public discourse simply does not allow for an easy discussion of this issue.