Conservatives twist meaning of 'racism' and race-related phrases
By Richard Prince
Last fall, President
Clinton called for a national dialogue on race. That dialogue hasn't
gotten very far, and one reason could be because we can't even agree
on the meaning of the words we use.
Let's start with
racism. Then we can add in "racial preferences" and "reverse
discrimination."
The word "racism" is
casually being
used to describe the actions of African Americans, continuing a
semantic offensive by conservatives in which Blacks are accused of the
same sins that have been visited on them these many centuries.
Unfortunately, even some Afrian Americans are going along with it.
The editor-in-chief
of Merriam-Webster dictionaries, Fred Mish, states the problem this
way: "People tend to bend the meanings of words to suit their own
particular purposes. That's how old words gain new meanings."
Changing the meanings
of politically charged words, and trivializing them in the process, is
more than an issue of semantics. We carry out public policy based on
what we believe words mean.
In the dictionaries I
use, "racism" packs a wallop. It clearly refers to a system to oppress
people based on their race. Nazi Germany is one reference point.
The unabridged Webster's Third New International (1993), for example,
defines racism as:
1. The assumption
that psycho-cultural traits and capacities are determined by
biological race and that races differ decisively from one another,
which is usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of
a particular race and its right to dominate over others (my emphasis.)
(Random House
Unabridged, 2nd edition (also 1993) weighs in similarly,
except it uses the phrase "the right to rule over others."
These definitions are
not recent. Webster's Third New International's
hasn't changed since it was first published in 1961.
The English language
has other words for acting ill toward others because of their race. We
can denounce it as racial prejudice. We can condemn it as bigotry.
Yet during the
Million Man March, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's
anti-Semitism, wrong though it is, was hysterically called racism. The
phrase, "Black racism is no better than White racism" gained currency.
Political cartoonists morphed Farrakhan's face into images of
ex-Klansman David Duke, or retired L.A. cop Mark Fuhrman, or even
Adolf Hitler.
Then there was last
December's tragic incident in Harlem, in which a Black arsonist killed
himself and seven other people after setting fire to a Jewish-owned
clothing store.
Today, the Rev. Al
Sharpton and others in the small band who demonstrated against the
store owner are being called "racist" accessories to the killings -
even though people of color died as well.
But Hitler and
Fuhrman had the power of the government to back up their bigotry, a
crucial distinction. Duke came close, nearly winning the Louisiana
governorship. The lone gunman who died in the Harlem fire had no such
state power. Nor did the Harlem demonstrators, who expressed no
feelings of inherent superiority over anyone else. At bottom, they
simply wanted outsiders to stop exploiting their community.
I suspect the recent
round of racial-language bending started in the 1970s, when
conservatives added "reverse discrimination" to the racial canon. We
know what it means, but does it really make sense? Either there is
discrimination or there isn't. "Reverse discrimination" implies that
those who seek to redress injustice are just as wrong as those who
create it.
Then came use of the
phrase "racial preferences" as a synonym for affirmative action. You'd
never know that the real "racial preferences" still go to members of
the old boys' network.
The U.S. Civil Rights
Commission answered that one back in 1981. It said, "Only if today's
society were operating fairly acting fairly toward minorities and
women would measures that take race, sex and national origin into
account be preferential treatment." But who was listening?
Humpty Dumpty
declared in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean,
neither more nor less." He insisted that his words were his alone to
define.
That approach doesn't
make the conversation easy, does it?
Prince is co-chair of
the Media Monitoring Committee of the National Association of Black
Journalists. He is publications editor for a non-profit organization
in Washington, D.C.
For the National
Newspaper Publishers Association, March 6, 1996
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No honor for Confederacy
By Richard Prince
Starting today, you'll be able to send me a letter with the images of
Confederate heroes President Jefferson Davis or Gen. Robert E. Lee or
of a successful Confederate battle. Forgive me if I become unglued.
It matters not a lick that the U.S. Postal Service is also peddling
32-cent stamps showing Abraham Lincoln, abolitionist Frederick
Douglass and Gen. Ulysses Grant. They were the good guys all along.
Someone at the Postal Service got the bright idea to issue 20
first-class postage stamps commemorating the Civil War, the great
conflict whose legacy still sears America's psyche like an overseer's
lash.
To be evenhanded, the 20-stamp set features 10 representing the North,
nine the South and one stamp the naval battle between the Monitor and
the Merrimack, a draw.
But since when was the Civil War a contest between equals? Whatever
happened to the idea that the secessionists committed treason?
Does no one remember that when Lincoln was assassinated, Jefferson
Davis was considered so disloyal that new President Andrew Jackson
offered $ 100,000 for the defeated Confederate president's arrest?
I thought we had all agreed that by opposing Confederate secession,
the federal government stood unequivocally against the ideology for
which Confederates died: that black people were biologically inferior
and that slavery was their "natural" condition.
Let's put this argument another way: Would the Postal Service
commemorate World War II by issuing stamps depicting Adolf Hitler and
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel?
We Americans are sensitive to the symbolic value our stamps hold. We
only have to remember the withdrawal this year, after Japanese
objections, of a stamp showing a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Or the
Postal service's decision to reproduce a classic photograph of
legendary bluesman Robert Johnson - but to airbrush out his cigarette.
So far, the Civil War set has provoked hardly a murmur. Yet its
symbolism rankles, and not only because it comes amid an affirmative
action backlash, continuing skirmishes over the flying of the
Confederate flag, and best-selling books declaring blacks
intellectually inferior. It is disturbing because it continues the
falsehood that the Union and the Confederacy both represented
respectable ideologies.
"Throughout this century textbooks have presented the Civil War as a
struggle between 'virtually identical peoples,' " writes James W.
Loewen, a University of Vermont sociology professor, in his remarkable
examination of 12 high school history books, Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Not much has changed, Loewen says. "Nobody fought to preserve racial
slavery; nobody fought to end it. As one result, unlike the Nazi
swastika which lies disgraced, even in the North whites still proudly
display the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy on den walls, license
plates, T-shirts and high school logos. .. . . In this sense, long
after Appomattox, the Confederacy still lives."
Last year, a number of publishers reissued or repackaged oral
testimonies of former slaves compiled in the 1930s. They are worth
reading, for they tell of the jubilation slaves expressed when
victorious Union soldiers came through the South; they speak of the
brave human beings who so detested the "peculiar institution" to which
they were consigned that they killed themselves or spent years
literally living underground.
A great war was fought to establish the supremacy of those who
liberated these folks over those who enslaved them.
People in the federal government, of all places, ought to know that.
USA Today
June 29, 1995
Back to top
Role of US explored in black
leader assassinations
By Richard Prince
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
It took hardly a nanosecond for Gus Newport to agree with the premise
that the FBI and the CIA were behind the assassination of Malcolm X.
Newport, now an urban planner in the San Francisco area and a former
Berkeley mayor, accompanied a ''rough, disheveled'' marked-for-death
Malcolm from New York City to Rochester, N.Y., on Feb. 16, 1965, five
days before Malcolm was killed.
Newport attended the sham trial of the alleged assassins.
Three members of the Nation of Islam, the religious group Malcolm by
then had repudiated, were convicted of his murder. One, Thomas Hagan,
is still in a Queens, N.Y., prison. The two others, paroled in the
1980s after more than 20 years in prison, always protested their
innocence.
Many who were in New York's Audubon Ballroom during the assassination
say there were really five gunmen. They say only one, Hagan, was
caught, and the rest got away clean. Hagan himself later named the
five.
Two new books - one still in manuscript form - make a persuasive case
for reopening the investigation into Malcolm's assassination, just as
Congress re- examined the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther
King Jr.
They document how low the FBI of the bad old days - under the
obsessive J. Edgar Hoover - would stoop to ''neutralize'' any
challenger to Hoover's version of patriotism.
But not just the FBI was involved. In those days the CIA had a
domestic branch that became concerned as Malcolm X began to forge ties
with African and Third World leaders that could embarrass the United
States over its racial troubles.
As everyone knows who has seen Spike Lee's ''Malcolm X,'' or read
Malcolm's autobiography, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad made
it clear he wouldn't mind seeing Malcolm killed.
But did the domestic intelligence community stand by and wait for that
to happen? Or did they hold Elijah's coat for him?
''They were able to purchase for hire some dissident Muslims,''
declared Newport, a '60s civil rights activist who became Malcolm's
friend. ''Malcolm, Martin. Anybody able to organize large numbers of
black people'' was a threat.
''This author contends that Malcolm's murder resulted from three
intertwined conspiracies,'' writes Zak A. Kondo, a professor at
Maryland's Bowie State University in his soon-to-be-published ''Conspiracys:
Unraveling the Assassination of Malcolm X.''
''The first was orchestrated by FBI agents who employed various
schemes to oust Malcolm from the Nation of Islam, provoke a war
between him and the NOI, and to set up his murder.
''The second conspiracy - fed by the first - was orchestrated by the
NOI hierarchy, which authorized New Jersey Muslims to plan and execute
the murder.
''The third was orchestrated by the New York City Police Department,
which compromised Malcolm's security, permitted all but one of the
assassins to escape, and framed two innocent men.''
These are serious charges, but not surprising to anyone familiar with
CIA political assassinations abroad and the FBI's intelligence
operations at home during that era.
In 1975, Senate hearings held by what became known as the Church
Committee uncovered all kinds of dirty tricks against African-American
activists conducted under COINTELPRO, the acronym for the FBI's
counterintelligence program of the 1960s.
In his 1989 book ''Racial Matters: The FBI's Secret File on Black
America, 1960-1972,'' Kenneth O'Reilly describes how the FBI egged on
a feud between the Black Panther Party and another black nationalist
West Coast group called US.
The FBI would mail inflammatory cartoons and letters to one group in
the name of the other. The results? Retaliatory bombings. Killings.
''That's as close as it got to the FBI actually being involved in
murder,'' maintains O'Reilly.
In the recently published page-turner ''The Judas Factor: The Plot to
Kill Malcolm X'' (Thunder's Mouth Press), author Karl Evanzz tells how
Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan circulated a memo urging that
the FBI handpick ''a new national Negro leader'' once King, Malcolm X
and Elijah Muhammad were destroyed.
''When this is done, and it can and will be done, obviously much
confusion will reign, particularly among the Negro people,'' the memo
reads. ''The Negroes will be left without a national leader of
sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper
direction.''
Thought was given to a congressional investigation of Malcolm's
assassination in 1978, when the House revisited the killings of
Kennedy and King, but Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz, objected.
Perhaps the climate is better now. I'm not one for conspiracy
theories. But I am for learning the truth.
Was it really just a coincidence that Malcolm was poisoned in Egypt as
U.S. agents watched nearby, a day before he was to urge the
Organization of African Unity to bring U.S. racism before the United
Nations?
Or that, as Evanzz reports, after looking at 300,000 pages of FBI and
CIA documents, the FBI feared that King and Malcolm - the yin and yang
of the civil rights struggle - were moving closer together?
Even O'Reilly, who discounts an intelligence community conspiracy to
kill Malcolm (''Malcolm was very small potatoes - what the FBI did to
him they had done to 10,000 others'') agrees that ''they didn't get
the guys who did it.''
A public airing of more dirty linen would be painful, and many don't
trust the government to get to the bottom of this anyway.
It would pain us to learn about the officially sanctioned violence
conducted at home with taxpayers' money.
It would be horrifying to find out how violent a homegrown
organization, the Nation of Islam, became in the service of religious
zealotry.
But we might also learn more about what truths Malcolm knew that made
him so dangerous. And we might even be reassured - if all goes well -
that Hoover's bad old days really are gone.
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE
December 18, 1992
Back to top
Native Americans get to even
score
By Richard Prince
It has nothing to do with the two white teen-agers
who called out ''nigger'' as I walked down Main Street.
I believed it even before I ventured onto the only city in the United
States built almost entirely on land leased from Indians - before I
encountered this double-insult graffiti in a downtown bar:
''Indians are Living Proof that Niggers did (mate with)
Buffaloe's''(sic). I have witnesses. I thought the Indians deserved to
win even when I thought the insults would involve only white folks and
Indians.
That's because the expectations were that the Indians who own
Salamanca, N.Y., would be extinct by now. Instead they are very much
alive - and, for once, victorious.
The story, set on the New York-Pennsylvania border against the
breathtaking backdrop of the Allegheny Mountains, begins with the
railroads.
The old Erie Railroad, a forerunner of Conrail, came through Salamanca
back in 1851, traveling from New York to Chicago. Daniel Webster would
have his chair bolted to a flatcar.
The BR and P - the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh - hauled coal
from the Pennsylvania coal mines.
The railroads leased rights of way through the Allegany Indian
Reservation, owned by the Seneca Nation of Indians.
The land attracted farmers and railroad workers, who leased the land
cheap from Seneca tribesmen - even though that was illegal. The land
belonged to the tribe, not to individual Indians.
Yet so many whites had made sizeable profits by subleasing the Indian
land that in 1875, a Congress dominated by railroad interests made the
illegal leases legal.
The coup de grace came in 1890, when Congress extended those leases
for 99 years, starting in 1892 - without providing for any way to
raise the fees.
The going rate was one of the world's great bargains: An average $ 4
per year per parcel. Many went for just $ 1 a year - for 99 years.
''They presumed that in 99 years there wouldn't be any Senecas
around,'' said history Prof. Lawrence M. Hauptman of State University
of New York at New Paltz. ''The Indian was seen as anachronistic in
terms of late 19th- century America.''
Next Feb. 19, the 99 years are up. The Seneca Nation is still there.
So is the city of Salamanca and its nervous 6,600 people.
They own their houses, but not the land under them. The uncertainty
has meant many can't get mortgages, that businesses won't invest in
their city.
Yet many lease-holders love living there. So they're not moving.
''It's beautiful country, for one thing,'' said Judy Wymer, whose
family has been here 50 years. You can walk around at night without
ever worrying about being mugged, accosted, raped.''
''It never really hit us until this came up,'' added Gerri Ullman, her
co-worker at a clothing factory outlet store. ''We've been paying
taxes on land that wasn't even ours. We knew it in the back of our
minds, but ...''
But for a while, one-quarter of the residents never bothered even to
pay the Senecas their $ 1. As late as the 1940s, many were trying to
persuade Congress that the leases should be considered titles -
removing the Senecas from ownership.
That's why it's hard not to root for the Indian. It's the underdog
winning.
Five hundred leaseholders packed the refurbished Seneca Theater on
Nov. 1. They'd like to nullify the deal their representatives
negotiated with the Senecas.
Such a deal:
- This time, the leases will be good for only 40 years, not 99.
- This time, the lessees will be assessed for 8 percent of the actual
land value, not for $ 1. And if the total figure for all leases
doesn't reach $ 800,000, the city will pay the Senecas the balance.
This time, past wrongs will be redressed. Congress must pay the
Senecas $ 35 million and New York must pay $ 25 million. Otherwise,
the deal is off - and the residents become squatters.
To its credit, Congress voted the federal part of the bargain in late
October's marathon sessions. President Bush signed the legislation
Nov. 3.
Likewise, Gov. Mario Cuomo, perhaps mindful of other Indian trouble
this year, has pledged his support, though he has yet to line up
allies in his state legislature.
Sure, there are thorny questions here - and the residents are right to
raise them. For instance, as members of a sovereign nation, the
Senecas are exempt from taxes.
If the Senecas use their $ 60 million to buy out some of the
leaseholders, that would remove property from the Salamanca tax rolls
- raising the remaining lease-holders' taxes.
The governor has promised to help make up any lost revenue by boosting
economic development here. The Salamancans should hold him to that.
What a luxury the Senecas have! Whether Cuomo keeps his word on this
isn't their problem.
They also have no time to get mad about slurs or insults. For once,
they can just get even.
Richard Prince writes for the Democrat and Chronicle and Times-Union
in Rochester, N.Y.
Gannett News Service
November 3, 1990
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