The Revenge Of P.C.
John McWhorter hits on the core of the difference between the two kinds of reactions to Obama’s speech: the audience’s educational background. That does not mean, as I see it, that the people who reacted very badly to the speech are wrong or benighted, as I’m sure some Obama fans would have it (I hasten to note that McWhorter doesn’t say this), but points to two things that explain why elite commentary has generally been so much more favourable to Obama’s speech than general public reaction: people who spend a lot of (or too much) time in academia or elite institutions of any kind are exposed on a regular basis to the demands of political correctness and will start to internalise them if they are not very careful, and they are conditioned to appreciate subtlety, nuance and context to what can be an almost maddening degree for many people. These people generally, but not necessarily, responded favourably to the speech because it was pitched to them and written by someone who comes from the same kind of background and speaks their language. Those who have a background in “higher education” but who turned against the speech did so for at least one of two reasons. The first is, as I have suggested earlier, that elite conservatives have defensively internalised the requirements of political correctness as a way of retaining mainstream respectability and gaining access to the conversation, and so insist on enforcing them against deviants on the left, oblivious that reinforcing these rules works ultimately to squeeze them ever more tightly until they are compelled to abandon entire subjects for fear of violating the ridiculous speech rules that they once used to reject out of hand. The other reason centers around the difference over policy and philosophical disagreement, and these negative critiques tended to focus on the standard liberal policy fare Obama offered.
Of course, it is revealing that the reaction to the controversy over the newsletters using Rep. Paul’s name is exactly the inverse: the precious, goo-goo cosmotarians were the first to jump ship, and the Middle American conservative response was generally sympathetic with or protective of Paul. In the end, the people who responded most favourably to each candidate when he was confronted with controversy were the sorts of people who were already supporting the candidate disproportionately before the controversy. In Obama’s case, this usually included educated professionals and members of the mainstream media. Surprise, surprise, these are the people who have fallen all over themselves praising Obama as a conquering hero. Everyone else, for the most part, took the controversy as an occasion to take Obama down a few notches or to justify not supporting him, which they may have wanted to do all along but may have been reluctant to do openly earlier. That elite conservatives could turn on Obama with guns blazing in their phony p.c.-driven rage was the perfect arrangement for them: they could express disapproval of the media darling because he had made a very un-p.c. blunder, making it possible for them to pose as the champions of the kind of “liberal intolerance” they might have decried a decade or two earlier.
Meanwhile, middle- and working-class white (and probably other) audiences heard this, remembered the anti-racist catechisms they had been taught for as long as they could remember and understood that the proper, approved reaction was to shake their heads and boo. McWhorter makes a similar observation. Now that anti-racism has captured the minds of so many of these people, now that the conditioning has had its intended effect, observers sympathetic to Obama are dismayed that Obama’s nuanced effort to explain (or, as the critics have it, explain away) racially-charged and potentially racialist rhetoric fell on deaf ears. Yet this shouldn’t surprise anyone–if the speech fell on deaf ears, it was the elites who deafened them years before with a single, simple imperative: “Don’t pay attention to race, except when we tell you to!” I agree with McWhorter that the conditioned reaction on display is “sad,” but its causes are to be found in the kind of thought policing and “sensitivity training” that conditioned them that way in the first place.
Update: Rasmussen has a poll on the ongoing reaction to the controversy and the speech. John McWhorter will be encouraged to know that most people regarded the speech as excellent/good, and just 21% thought it “poor” (probably overlapping with the 21% who thought it was divisive). However, 42% say that they are “very concerned” about Obama’s relationship with Wright (30% of Democrats and 25% of liberals say the same) and 14% are somewhat concerned–they are responding just as they have been taught to respond. This tends to be concentrated most among Republicans, whites and men, but it is at similar levels across all age groups. All together, 61% of whites are “concerned,” 48% of them very much so, compared to 36% (19/17) of black voters and 39% (21/18) of “other.” So it seems as if reactions to the speech are separate from the ongoing controversy over the relationship with Wright, as at least some of the people who say they are concerned about the latter reacted positively to the speech.
Second Update: It may also be relevant to this post that one of the most positive reactions to the speech on the conservative side came from Charles Murray (not exactly someone who could be accused of yielding to the dictates of political correctness), who elaborated on why he found the speech so impressive:
Text that deals with a difficult racial issue is like a Rorschach ink blot. People project onto that text—project their own experiences, anxieties, angers; all the emotions that go into thinking about race, which means all the emotions that exist. You can weigh every word of your text. You can rewrite it until you think there is absolutely no way that a fair-minded person can fail to understand what you said. And they will not only fail to understand it, they will accuse you of saying exactly the opposite of what you said.
What Murray and Obama seem to have in common is that they express some interest in understanding this difficult subject, rather than in striking the appropriate, expected poses. As Peggy Noonan suggests, this is all the more remarkable in Obama, because he is a politician and therefore should normally be allergic to thinking through a problem. As Ross noted the other day, some part of the reaction to the speech was, as I suggested above, disagreement about the policy implications (or the lack of policy imagination) in it, which means that conservative audiences did not arrive at the same conclusions as Obama.
Also, I don’t mean to imply that people with other educational backgrounds can’t understand nuance and complexity, which they often can, but that they respond to it by viewing it as an attempt to skirt the issue or react to the controversy in much more stark terms, which is where the anti-racism conditioning comes in. For years they have been told that context doesn’t matter when it comes to statements that are deemed racist, and now they are expected to accept Obama’s attempted contextualisation of a controversy. But they’ve seen these controversies before, and they know how it’s supposed to work according to the rules that they have been told to obey: the perpetrator expresses groveling contrition for his offense, he probably still loses his job or is shunned by polite society, and then we move to the next item of business. As Rod correctly notes, there is enormous frustration with the double standard applied to the right, but the only chance of getting rid of the double standard is to break the habit of ritually condemning and ostracising offenders. The left may never give up trying to use such accusations as bludgeons, but at the very least conservatives could begin once again to view them as what they are: the tools for increasing the left’s political and cultural power. That’s the thing–even if conservatives could use Wright to break Obama’s candidacy, they would be empowering their opponents and reinforcing their worldview.
Filed under: politics
I’ve started responding to this a few times, but I haven’t been able to find just the right words. This is the best I can do.
I think your point is insightful, and largely correct as far as I goes. But let’s try a little counterfactual. Let us assume, for a moment, that the whole “PC” phenomenon never existed. It’s true, I think, that the particular form that opposition to the speech, and the whole issue of Rev. Wright, has taken would not be present absent the whole “PC” phenomenon.
But I wonder - while the form of the negative reaction would have been different, would the overall negative reaction (in some corners - we are taking, afterall, of a pretty small portion of the population that (a) was favorably disposed to Obama before the Wright tapes, and is (b) not favorably disposed now) have been any less? I don’t think so.
Which really gets to the underlying problem IMO. Independently of what peopel think are the right solutions to the problem of race in America, I think that McWhorter is correct - one thing that this episode has shown is the appalling ignorance in much of white America as to the realities of the black experience in America. And a less PC culture wouldn’t change that fact.
It is sad, and it’s doubly sad that it does not seem likely to get any better,
“But they’ve seen these controversies before, and they know how it’s supposed to work according to the rules that they have been told to obey: the perpetrator expresses groveling contrition for his offense, he probably still loses his job or is shunned by polite society, and then we move to the next item of business.”
It is not the comments of Rev. Wright per se that will continue to dog Obama, as virtually no evidence exists that Obama holds these views, barring a minority that is stretching to see in Obama the second coming of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Obama could have given a thoughtful speech about race relations in America at any time during this campaign. Obama’s speech, eloquent as it was, was transparently political and frankly a little arrogant; subtly shifting from the “Look at me and my pastor” to “Look at yourselves, America” framed in the context of a “frank” discussion of racial issues. I will confess to sometimes getting overly wrapped up in Obama’ rhetoric, and a few days of pondering the speech has left me much cooler to it than my initial impression.
The left may never give up trying to use such accusations as bludgeons, but at the very least conservatives could begin once again to view them as what they are: the tools for increasing the left’s political and cultural power. That’s the thing–even if conservatives could use Wright to break Obama’s candidacy, they would be empowering their opponents and reinforcing their worldview.
Amen, amen, amen.
“For years they have been told that context doesn’t matter when it comes to statements that are deemed racist, and now they are expected to accept Obama’s attempted contextualisation of a controversy. But they’ve seen these controversies before, and they know how it’s supposed to work according to the rules that they have been told to obey: the perpetrator expresses groveling contrition for his offense, he probably still loses his job or is shunned by polite society, and then we move to the next item of business. As Rod correctly notes, there is enormous frustration with the double standard applied to the right, but the only chance of getting rid of the double standard is to break the habit of ritually condemning and ostracising offenders.”
I find this a little odd. Obama is not accused of making racist statements, so why should he be expected to act contrite. I’m not even clear about whether Wright is being accused of racism, or only of being overly angry and unpatriotically blaming America. What I also find odd is the notion that there’s a double standard here. I’m not aware of Mitt Romney being required to denounce Brigham Young and leave the Mormon Church because of its long history of racist policies and statements. Why would Obama be required to leave because the leader of his Church made comments of far lesser umbrage? If’ there’s a double-standard in regards to one’s religious and political associates, it seems to be wieghted in favor of the right, not the left.
And this whole thing about educated elites being full of nuanced understanding - what a load of crap. I never went to college, I’ve worked in blue-collar jobs and worse my whole life, and I get what Obama is about just fine. I can recognize a good man when I see one, without all the blathering analysis. As can my colleagues in the lower classes.
It’s kind of funny to witness the cognitive dissonance of liberal neoconservatives when they learn, for the 20th time, that most people are tribal, do not endorse their radical modernist individualist gospel, and that minorities in particular are looking out for number one and are not particularly interested in justice between the races so much as revenge.
Obama needs a jokewriter, fast. Race is one of those things that’s more hopeless than serious, but Obama is way too serious about “race and inheritance” because his whole identity is tied up in them, and he’s terribly, terribly serious about himself.
Your last two paragraphs make two important points extremely well. First:
What Murray and Obama seem to have in common is that they express some interest in understanding this difficult subject, rather than in striking the appropriate, expected poses.
Poses! Second:
[T]he only chance of getting rid of the double standard is to break the habit of ritually condemning and ostracising offenders.
Well put.
The claim here, with which Maximos apparently agrees, would appear to be that intimate association with racists is perfectly OK, and that the problem with PC is that it objects to intimate association with racists.
I disagree.
In my opinion, the problem with PC is that it constantly pretends to find racism where there is none.
Jeremiah Wright’s racism is open and apparent. Barack Obama’s association with him could hardly be more intimate. There is nothing “PC” about objecting to Barack Obama on that basis.
I’ll bite. How are we defining racism here, and which of Wright’s comments reflect “open and apparent” racism? (As opposed to, say, suspicion of and contempt for the government.) Are we talking about his railing against the government, and couching his criticism in terms that white people have historically controlled the nation? How do they compare to the collected works of, say, Steve Sailer?