What is the point of the Michael Richards incident? or for that matter, the Mel Gibson incident earlier this year? Well for one thing, Gibson was drunk. Was Richards drunk? He certainly looks like that might be a possibility in the video. Besides that possiblility, he was being heckled and blew up with a remarkable display of racist slurs that went well beyond just being politically incorrect, it was in the range of certifiable road rage.
It comes down to the heart of prejudice. Prejudice is part of the human condition. The "unprejudiced man" is simply a fantasy, or an ideal, but not a real possibility.
by Leo Tolstoy"Oh, if you want to learn the spirit of the people by arithmetical computation, of course it’s very difficult to arrive at it. And voting has not been introduced among us and cannot be introduced, for it does not express the will of the people; but there are other ways of reaching that. It is felt in the air, it is felt by the heart. I won’t speak of those deep currents which are astir in the still ocean of the people, and which are evident to every unprejudiced man; let us look at society in the narrow sense. All the most diverse sections of the educated public, hostile before, are merged in one. Every division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is carrying them in one direction."
In these recent public outbursts, the formulation we seem to be working with is that both Gibson and Richards are closet "racists" whose "true feelings" came out under the influence of either alcohol or provocation [heckling]. And when each of these guys apologized, they said that they weren’t really racists [to, I might add, a very skeptical audience]. I believe them, sort of.
We are all racist, sexist, prejudiced at some level about something. It’s an inevitable human quality [maybe not Mother Teresa, but there aren’t many of those]. The issue is whether we are aware of our racism, our sexism, and our other prejudices – or hide them behind a cloud of denial or unconsciousness. My guess would be that these two guys were not aware enough of their prejudices to keep them from interfering with the actual conduct of their lives.
Our society right now is in a bit of trouble because our actual level of prejudice is being suppressed, repressed, denied, etc. There is a lot of prejudice focused on Mexicans, Arabs, Jews, Homosexuals, Blacks, Women, Liberals. But there’s also a lot of prejudice focused on Conservatives, Whites, Men, Christians, Moslems, Atheists, etc. We would do well to learn from Mel Gibson and Michael Richards why it is worth our time to acknowledge and explore "those deep currents which are astir in the still ocean of the people."
America is built on a concept that embraces diversity – a really hard thing to embrace on an individual basis. With diversity comes prejudice. With prejudice comes the responsibility to look at one’s own side of the street – to know our own prejudices as well as we know our desires. Most of this terrible crisis in our current government has its roots in unspoken prejudice.
The reason to know one’s prejudices deeply is easy. If you’re prejudiced against women in general and know it, you can look at an individual woman and think about the actual human being you’re dealing with without automatically simplifying her as just "woman." If you’re out of touch with your prejudice, you’ll act on "woman" rather than person without even knowing it. And worse, if you’re unaware of your prejudicial feelings and you get drunk or really mad, you’re going to be up the same creek as Mel and Michael, without a paddle.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.