Now Replace the Word “Black” With “White”

I don’t mean to pick on Gerald, but his recent post at The Cafeteria is Closed regarding the racial identity of Barack Obama’s church furnishes me with an example of a rhetorical tactic I often find problematic. In the post, Gerald presents quotes from the church’s website about how it is “Unashamedly Black,” has deep roots in “the Black religious experience,” etc., and then, as an argument for the church’s racism, asks us to imagine what we would think if the church had used the word “white” instead of “black.”

This “what if things were reversed” trope isn’t unique to Gerald, by any means. It pops up fairly regularly not only with regard to race, but also with gender, religion, political views, and so on. I’ve even used some form of the argument myself on occasion. Sometimes the analogy is helpful, but I think that it just as often obscures as it enlightens, because the truth is that we very often have good reason for treating statements by or about blacks differently from similarly worded statements by or about whites.

Perhaps an example will make my meaning clear. While there are some people who prefer “African-American” to “black,” generally you aren’t going to be thought a bigot because you refer to African-Americans as blacks, and if someone said he thought it offensive to call European-Americans white he would be met with incredulity. Yet if someone were to call Asian Americans “yellows” we would find this offensive. Why? After all, there’s nothing intrinsic to the word ‘yellow” that should make it more offensive that “black” or “white,” so why should our reaction to the two parallel terms be so different?

The answer, I think, is that “yellow” is offensive when use to refer to a racial group not because of anything inherent in the word, but because it was historically used as a derogatory term by people who held bigoted racial beliefs. The words “white” and “black” don’t have such histories, and thus don’t conger the same associations that “yellow” does is this context. Similarly, if talk about “White Pride” seems more disturbing and dubious than talk of “Black Pride,” it might have something to do with the fact that talk of “White Pride,” “the White race,” and so forth have been historically associated with racial chauvinism and oppression of non-white groups in a way that’s just not true of talk of “Black Pride.”

If one wants to judge whether Obama’s church’s Afrocentrism has gone “over the line” as it were from a legitimate affection to one’s own group to something more troubling, a better test would be to replace the word “black” not with the word “white,” but with “Irish” or “Polish” or some other ethnic term that lacks the negative connotations that we would associated with things like a Congressional White Caucus or a NAAWP. And if I saw a church that advertised itself as “Unashamedly Greek and Unapologetically Christian” I probably wouldn’t think the church was racist. I’d think it was Greek Orthodox.