Beyond Imus: It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid!

Periodically, some new wound rips the scab off our national, livid scar where sex and race intersect: the young law professor, Anita Hill, shaming Congress by her dignity and inspiring women with her truth; the O.J. Simpson circus trials; the Duke-Lacrosse mystery; Don Imus v. the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team.

We're an adolescent country, ahistoric, not that well educated. Most Americans still don't know that "races" do not exist, that what gets termed "races" are miniscule physical variations across our species, due to different survival adaptations we've developed since our human ancestors migrated from Africa to other geographical regions. (One instance: in a sun-drenched sub-Saharan climate, melanin in our pigmentation created darker skin as a protective necessity; under cloudier northern skies, paler pigmentation suppressing melanin became necessary so we could absorb more Vitamin D from the sun.)

Yet ironically, while believing "race" is real, many Americans think racism, sexism, and other bigotries are myths -- a staggering feat of collective denial. How many times have you heard someone start (or finish) a diatribe with "Well, I'm no racist (sexist, homophobe, etc.), but ... ?

Michael Richards follows his melt-down by proclaiming he's not a racist; Mel Gibson weeps he's not an anti-Semite; actor Isaiah Washington calls a colleague "faggot," but insists he's no homophobe. Politicians spew blatant or coded hate speech, then muster blame-the-victim, nonapology apologies ("Sorry if anyone mistook what I meant"). They all scuttle behind the excuse of work-stress or alcoholism while fleeing to the latest damage-control hideaway: rehab.

Howard Stern, who built his career on every form of bigotry, "libertarian" Bill Maher, and new neocon Dennis Miller all boast about attacking "the Establishment" while they parrot and reinforce its basest values, and hide behind the "equal-opportunity insulter" justification -- as if pain lands with the same impact on the powerless as on the powerful. A few others walk a fine line of satirizing prejudices while trying not to reinforce them. Stephen Colbert has built a not-so-bright, archconservative character deliberately to skewer that character's politics. Yet even Jon Stewart, whose work I admire, at times jettisons his political conscience where sexism is concerned -- perhaps too eager to court that age 18 to 24 pale-male consumer demographic?

But all of these "truth-telling," "ground-breaking," "ballsy," so-called rebels, however much they might now tiptoe around "the N word," tiptoe more around words that would be really dangerous to use, especially in self-examination:

The R word: Racist. The S word: Sexist. The H word: Homophobe.

Well, after a lifetime of activism -- from the civil-rights movement through antiwar, antipoverty, the birth of lesbian and gay rights, the founding and flowering of the contemporary feminist movement in the United States and globally -- I am still a racist, a sexist, a homophobe. How could I not be? How can any of us -- no matter our sex or ethnicity -- not be sexist, racist, and all the other -ists? Our society sowed these seeds in our formative consciousness.

I remember my mother and aunts -- good women, liberal whites, working-class, apostate Jews, proud members of the NAACP -- unthinkingly saying "That's white of you," or "I'm free, white, and 21," or even "You can't wear those new shoes yet! Stop acting nigger-rich." Yet these women once soaped out the mouth of a playmate who used "nigger" as an epithet; all the while they chuckled at "Amos and Andy" stereotypes on the radio and made "No tickee no washee" jokes at the Chinese laundry. Conveniently, they didn't connect the dots.

As a child, I sure got their double message, though. Never since have I been able to cleanse myself totally of those messages, not under the blast of Southern sheriff's fire hoses, not on picket lines or at sit-ins or in jail cells. I wrestle with those toxins -- whispery, seductive, semiconscious -- every damned day, in myriad ways, and will do so until I die. Hannah Arendt termed this a necessary vigilance about "the Eichmann within," who gets loose only when not acknowledged. It's the hypocrisy. I believe that each of us truly commits to fight bigotry only when we get royally pissed at how it has warped our own humanity. At least then, with enlightened self-interest, we're less likely to play Lord or Lady Bountiful but abandon the direct victims when the going gets rough. There's no vaccine for these poisons siphoned into our systems, no individual-case cure. But recognition is the prerequisite step in treating such diseases until we can eradicate them outright. For that we need to come off it and tell the truth.