The cartoon is admittedly flawed because it spelled Martin’s first name incorrectly and it used a phrase (“colored boy”) that is offensive and could have been avoided (“black teenager.”) …
Posts tagged "racism"
I am not a prejudiced person…I have built Habitat homes for colored people.
County Commissioner Jim Gile of Saline County, Kansas, apologizing for using the term “n*gger-rigging.” Gile said he meant “jury-rigged.”
In his apology, “Gile said he also has a close friend whom he regards as a sister who is black,” the Salina Journal reported. “‘I don’t ever do anything bad and don’t know how to do anything bad. People know I am not,’ he said.”
That second part of the quote … well … it pretty much works to negate the first part of the quote.
But most importantly, from the perspective of those who care about terrible apologies, it’s noteworthy that Gile said in his apology that he meant to say “jury-rigged”: “I had it (jury-rigged) on my brain and this came out.” But when he was asked in the moment to repeat what he’d said, his reply was “Afro-Americanized.”
So, yeah, Gile was thinking something racist, then he said something really racist, and then he lied about what he meant to say when he “apologized.”
Rep. Don Young (R-AK) on Thursday night stood by his use of a racial slur to describe Latinos, saying that he “meant no disrespect” when he told an Alaska radio interviewer, “We used to hire 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes”:
“During a sit down interview with Ketchikan Public Radio this week, I used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in Central California,” Young said in the statement. “I know that this term is not used in the same way nowadays and I meant no disrespect.”
This is a terrible apology in no small part because it’s not an apology at all. It’s also a terrible apology because it doesn’t make any sense.
Young isn’t sorry for using a racial slur and disrespecting people. He’s not even sorry that people felt disrespected by what he regards as a simply miscommunication. He simply insists that everyone used the word “wetbacks” without any ill intent back when he was younger and, though it has apparently now become a racial slur, he didn’t mean it that way.
It’s hard to imagine how Young “meant no disrespect” if he knows “that this term is not used in the same way nowadays.” What’s more, the fact that the term was commonly used when he was younger in no way suggests that it was less disrespecful back then. It was equally disrespecful and people are less inclined to casually toss it around today than they were then because, generally, people want at the very least to seem more respectful of others than Young apparently does.
“Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret,” Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor, wrote in a statement sent to POLITICO. “Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.”
This one’s a particularly terrible apology.
First of all, there’s no apology; there’s simply a statement of regret. But the editor seems to suggest his regret is that the cover illustration “got strong reactions” rather than that the cover was overtly racist. And since he claims that the “intention was not to incite or offend,” he further implies that the strong reactions might have simply been the result of a misunderstanding, rather than the natural result of his decision to publish an offensive cover illustration.
Awful magazine cover, awful apology. Just awful.
HT: Drew Taub.
(Cross posted with my blog)
Emory University President James Wagner issued the following apology in response to the negative attention directed at him for what seemed to be a positive mention he gave to the notorious 3/5ths Compromise in the U.S. Constitution:
A number of people have raised questions regarding part of my essay in the most recent issue of Emory Magazine. Certainly, I do not consider slavery anything but heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman. I should have stated that fact clearly in my essay. I am sorry for the hurt caused by not communicating more clearly my own beliefs. To those hurt or confused by my clumsiness and insensitivity, please forgive me.
Wagner’s apology continues for a great many paragraphs. And it’s all pretty terrible, especially the part where he attempts to explain precisely what was good about the 3/5ths Compromise:
The point was not that this particular compromise was a good thing in itself. It was a repugnant compromise. Of course it is not good to count one human being as three fifths of another or, more egregiously, as not human at all, but property. Rather, the first point of the essay was that the Constitution had to be a deeply compromised document in order to be adopted at all.
In other words, Wagner wants to be clearer about the fact that he isn’t someone who adheres to the belief that African-Americans should count as 3/5ths of a person, something he wasn’t adequately clear about in his original column.
But he also still wants to hold onto the virtue of compromise for politicians who can’t agree on much but still need to find a way to move forward for the good of the country.
Here’s what he wrote in the original column:
One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.
Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.
In other words, no one wanted slaves to be considered akin to human beings; the question was really about political influence in the new federal government and the two sides recognized that counting or not counting the slave population could make a major difference with regard to that influence. This is something I hope most people already know.
To call the compromise a “pragmatic half-victory” and to argue that “Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared” is to embarrassingly white-wash the colossal failure of both sides in the constitutional debate to confront (or even to think seriously about) the terrible crimes being perpetrated against a large group of human beings.
What Wagner should have said in his apology is that there are a whole lot of examples of compromise that would have suited his purposes far better than the one that he foolishly chose because those other examples aren’t bogged down by the tremendous weight of the world historical injustice of chattel slavery.
Compromise is generally a good thing and it’s a political virtue we haven’t experienced very often of late. But not every compromise is a good example because sometimes both sides take morally reprehensible positions and then they meet in the middle, which is also a reprehensible position.
“The B’s lost and I just said it,” said one Western Massachusetts Bruins fan who called Ward a racial slur in a tweet. “The fact is, I’m not a racist. It was stupid of me. I would apologize to Joel Ward if I could.”
(via)
On occasion I have failed to provide appropriate verbal attributions on my radio broadcast, Richard Land Live!, and for that I sincerely apologize.
That’s Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s top public policy ethicist.
Here’s the reason for the apology:
The plagiarism came to light when Baptist blogger and Baylor University Ph.D. student Aaron Weaver posted a partial transcript from one of Land’s shows on his blog, TheBigDaddyWeave.com. The unattributed remarks were made on Land’s March 31 show about media, race and Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black Florida teenager who was shot and killed by a neighborhood security guard.
Weaver discovered that more than half the material for Land’s short segment was quoted nearly verbatim from Jeffrey Kuhner’s March 29 Washington Times Op-Ed, “Obama foments racial division.”
After that discovery, Weaver listened to the third hour of the same program and discovered that Land again used unattributed material, this time from an article in “Investor’s Business Daily.” He discovered a third example in Land’s Feb. 4 show in which Land quoted from a Washington Examiner editorial.
Here’s some context for the remarks, as well as some info on what you’re missing if you don’t regularly tune in to Land’s show:
In his radio show, Land described activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as “racial ambulance chasers” who, along with fringe groups like the Black Panthers, are fomenting a “mob mentality” in the Trayvon Martin case that is akin to what the Ku Klux Klan used to do to blacks in the South.
More here (HT: Laura Seay).
Here’s the apology from Stephanie Eisner who drew a terribly racist cartoon about the Trayvon Martin tragedy in The Daily Texan:
“I apologize for what was in hindsight an ambiguous cartoon related to the Trayvon Martin shooting. I intended to contribute thoughtful commentary on the media coverage of the incident, however this goal fell flat. I would like to make it explicitly clear that I am not a racist, and that I am personally appalled by the killing of Trayvon Martin. I regret any pain the wording or message of my cartoon may have caused.”
This is the cartoon:
The full article is here.
Nirak also sent along the above apology from the cartoonist, and added some further information (via Pandagon), namely an “apology” from staff advisor Doug Warren:
Of course, as Nirak points out, “Oh, wait, I guess that last one wasn’t actually an apology.”
Yep. Not at all.
“I apologize to anyone offended by what one prominent black conservative called my ‘very practical and potentially life-saving campaign urging black and Hispanic parents not to let their children go around wearing hoodies,’” Rivera wrote in an email to Politico.
(via The Atlantic Wire, March 27, 2012)
