When Racists Meet

We are all by now familiar with the putrid and ugly racist rant that comedian Michael Richards (“Kramer” off Seinfeld) engaged in recently at a Los Angeles comedy club.That Richards’ sick behaviour should be condemned and that the comedian owes an apology to black people in general and to the individuals he verbally assaulted in particular – and perhaps even to the nation at large — is a given. What remains intriguing and tragic, of course, is the selective indignation and double standards that continue to exist in this nation in regards to racism and the expected apologies for it.When white people engage in racism, social pressures of all kinds arise to force into endless mea culpas and compensations. In the case of apologies, that should certainly be the case. But the same social phenomenon, curiously, does not arise when racial minorities perprtrate racial hate, either against each other or against white people. Connected to this reality is the bizarre development of Richards apologizing to, of all people, Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson – two notorious racists.Richards called Sharpton to apologize and also apologized to Jackson on Jackson’s radio show.It says something about black leadership in this country that its current “leaders” include two racists like Jackson and Sharpton. So Richards, in one sense, is stuck in the awkward predicament of trying to get his apology out to black people through the extremely limited avenues open to him. But it remains significant that our media and social critics have not caught the outrageous nature of this dynamic.While it is abundantly clear that Richards owes apologies of various kinds — no comparable pressures exist in our society that demand apologies from the likes of Jackson and Sharpton for the pernicious racial hate that they have engaged in over the years.Let us recall Jackson’s and Sharpton’s own monopoly on racial hate:In Sharpton’s case:In the midst of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, the good Reverend referred to Jews as “diamond merchants.”During the 1995 black boycott of Freddy’s clothing store in Harlem, Morris Powell, the leader of the boycott and the head of Sharpton’s Buy Black committee, referred to Jews as “crackers.” He shouted to passersby, “Keep [going] right on by Freddy’s. He’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our people. Don’t give the Jew a dime.” This was all done with Sharpton’s knowledge and blessing.After African immigrant Amadou Diallo was wrongly gunned down by four white officers in 1999, Sharpton led thousands of protesters in a series of marches denouncing both Mayor Giuliani and the alleged rampant police brutality over which he presided. With placards and chants, these protesters referred to Giuliani as, among other things, a “devil,” a “murderer,” a “monster,” a “bloodsucker,” and a “racist.”Sharpton has constantly referred to America as a racist snakepit and has characterized whites as uniformly racist. He has characterized white-on-black violence as “a national epidemic” – when he knows, like every socially conscious human being, that nothing could be further from the truth – and criminal justice statistics can easily demonstrate that.In Jackson’s case:As we well know, Jackson has referred to New York City as “Hymietown.”Jackson characterized Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences in California’s public sector, as a form of “ethnic cleansing” that would purge that state’s colleges and universities of supposedly “undesirable” minority students. He called former California governor Pete Wilson, who supported Prop 209, “the Susan Smith of politics,” a reference to a young mother who drowned her three small children in 1994; in other words, Jackson alleged that Wilson was planning to extinguish the hopes and dreams of countless minorities who needed his protection.Enraged by Ward Connerly’s opposition to affirmative action, he called Connerly a “house slave” and a “puppet of the white man.”Jackson also condemned Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote to place limits on affirmative action programs, characterizing Thomas’s vote as “a brutally violent act” that, “in effect, stabbed Dr. King, . . . paving the way back toward slavery.” Along with Sharpton, Jackson led a prayer vigil outside Thomas’s home to protest the Justice’s decision. Likening Thomas to a Klansman, Jackson asserted, “At night, the enemies of civil rights strike in white sheets, burning crosses. . . . By day, they strike in black robes.”Jackson has asserted that blacks are not only “despised,” but are actually “hunted for sport.”Then there was Jackson’s stance on the “Decatur 6” — the clique of violent gang-bangers who perpetrated violence and mayhem at a high-school football game in Decatur, Ill. Their violence, which was part of a gang confrontation, endangered innocent people, including women and children. Jackson supported these thugs, called them “our children,” and inferred that the villains in the case were the white members of the Decatur school board who wanted to punish them. He argued that whites were the problem in this incident and he broke the law and was arrested protesting these thugs’ expulsion from school.Both Sharpton and Jackson have, along with NAACP chief Kweisi Mfume, embraced race-hater and notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. Michael Richards’ apologies are in progress. The media and the nation are making sure of it.Good.But when are Sharpton’s and Jackson’s apologies to begin? When will our society and media become consumed in moral indignation about their past statements and behavior?And let us suppose that Jackson and Sharpton do decide to apologize. Would there be scepticism and shock if they did so by approaching someone like Michael Richards as their vehicle? It would seem rather absued and inappropriate for them to do so, no?The inappropriateness and absurdity of the reverse situation stares us in the face today.And there is a deafening silence about it.