Without belittling the evils of racism, I feel compelled to say that it is long past time for American society to stop overreacting to every allegedly racist “offense.”
Two stories in the news on Monday highlight the problems of hair-trigger racial sensitivities. In the first, two San Francisco area families are suing a Catholic school for $20 million for expelling teenage boys over a three-year-old incident supposedly involving the wearing of “blackface.” The parents quite believably say the substance at hand was dried acne medication. They said school officials jumped to conclusions in just four hours without doing real investigation of the circumstances.
In another, award-winning science reporter Donald McNeil published a three-part article explaining all the circumstances behind his forced resignation from the New York Times because he spoke the “N-word” aloud on a trip to Peru while answering a question about whether someone should be punished for a long-ago use of the word. As several of my Washington Examiner colleagues have thoughtfully opined, the New York Times’s treatment of McNeil was hideously unfair and unwise.
Stories like this have abounded in the past couple of years. There was the student-athlete whose admission to the University of Tennessee was rescinded after old video surfaced of her casually using the N-word while a high school freshman — not as a denigration of anyone but in an attempt to sound “hip” with a rap-song vibe. Reports are legion of college professors being disciplined or fired for using the word while discussing it “in a pedagogical sense,” and a black school security guard was fired (later rehired) for using the word in the course of telling a black student not to call him the word. The lunacy of that last situation is, of course, off the charts.
These overreactions are perhaps only slight different breeds of the same species of counterproductive freakouts that led to calls to remove statues and school names honoring Abe Lincoln, or even other major historical figures such as general P.G.T. Beauregard, who did yeoman’s work making amends for earlier support for racism or slavery.
It’s time for a collective chill-out. It is possible to decry racism — to react against the evil at Charlottesville, police brutality, and military bases named after incompetent Confederate generals — while still not abandoning nuance, context, history, perspective, fairness, and basic human decency.
To that end, all in authority in any walk of life of society ought to adopt a checklist of elements to consider before reacting in any official or even semiformal way to allegations of racist utterances or activities. To wit:
What was the context?
How long ago was it, and how serious was the offense?
Was it deliberate or inadvertent?
Was it malicious or merely an innocent lack of cultural awareness?
Was it an example of habitual racial animosity or a one-time slip?
How old or young was the (alleged) offender?
The last question should be especially determinative of leniency in response. Thirteen-year-olds who say stupid things shouldn’t be punished for them five years later. People in their 70s shouldn’t be hounded because of things they said while in college a half-century ago, which didn’t seem as insensitive then as they do now.
Victimhood and grievance must not be used as excuses for witch hunts, cancel culture, and severe retributive justice. Reason, balance, and constructive discussion should prevail. Racism is horrible, but so is misguided vengeance.
