Racist Facts: On The Dictionary Of Talk Radio

Hospitality is an inscrutable word. For if someone sends me an invitation to a party and then is rude to me at that party, even to the extent of ignoring me (this indeed has happened), I might begin to think my host invited me to submit to either his sadism or to my own self-abuse. I might even begin to think that hospitality was the sort of kindness that was meant to send me to the hospital, even the psychiatric hospital. I mean, I might think that a host is merely a person who takes another person hostage to inhospitality.

I have invited people here, to this rather sober salon, and I've tried to make them at the very least feel safe. Should a particularly petulant guest insult me to my face in the Comments section of each post, I have promised to treat that person with all due propriety. I am the host after all, and even if it means that as host I must endure my detractor's parasitic prose, so be it. It is what hospitality is all about: You shall be treated fairly, respectfully, and with grace.

But for the life of me I cannot figure out the hospitality of talk radio. Here one finds a host ostensibly inviting people to join him (or her) to "dialogue" and "debate in civil discourse", and yet at the slightest hint of a dialogue between interlocutors holding truly disparate views, the host usually turns dialogue to diatribe, with smatterings of abuse garnishing the canapés: the appetizers turn out, rather quickly, to be quite unappetizing and bitter. Oddly, people keep asking for more.

Last night was no exception as I listened to former Boston-based-now-nationally-syndicated master of soliloquy, Jay Severin, whose recent stint on MSNBC's The Situation with Tucker Carlson brought him some frequent TV face time. Mr. Severin received a call from a young man who took umbrage with Severin's observations around US immigration issues. Particularly, the young man averred that Severin's eloquent (he's always eloquent) litany of facts -- that the inner cities of America are rife with crime, illiteracy, poverty, and other such ills -- combined with the factual observation that such ills plague areas largely composed of minorities, amounted to racism. Moreover, the young man had the temerity to suggest that facts, in and of themselves, can be racist. Needless to say, the sharp-witted and sharp-tongued Severin scoffed at the idea that facts could be anything but coolly neutral, even value-less, devoid of any racial import or overtone. In his rebuttal, Severin cited dictionary entries of the word "racist"; his citations intimating that language was static––"racism" cannot mean anything but what the dictionary says it means (Severin forgets that dictionaries only list how words are used and not how they must be used). Severin also reminded listeners that he was of rather impressive intellectual stock, whereas his caller was not.

As Severin attempted to wrest the conversation toward something resembling a bad Socratic dialogue––where Severin would pose a question and yet would not restrain himself long enough to listen to his interlocutor's rather nuanced attempts to answer with some mindfulness of his own––Severin's scoffing only increased, even to the point where he was speaking over his guest's rather interesting and not at all antagonistic theory. And after the call was over and Severin returned from a commercial break to the blues music he allegedly adores, the scoffing could not be stopped, as he snidely suggested that he needed to be careful when he said that "blacks invented the blues," for such a statement of fact might be racist. Alas, I turned off the radio when Severin began his next segment with the proclamation that the argument facts can be racist is "the quintessence of the domestic threat to the United States Constitution that our Founding Fathers" were talking about.

Now quickly: Can a fact be racist? Well, what if I took five black men and five black women and put them in a cage (please, I am not advocating this), clinically observing them for 30 years, and then I published a factual article in a factual journal wherein I listed that the offspring of these black men and women tended toward incest, would that fact be racist? I think it would be. If I took a hundred thousand Jews and put them in a ghetto, let's say in Warsaw, and then I observed that the Jews seemed to be very shrewd at money-dealing on the black market and conniving in general, would that be a racist fact? I think it would be. What if I was a German scientist in 1944 and I observed that Jewish skin made for good soap, or effective lampshades? Would these not be "facts," and yet would they not also be "racist," making your very skin crawl?

I think they would.†

And what if I said that America's inner cities were rife with crime, with illegitimate children, absentee fathers, illiteracy and poverty everywhere, and that these things were mostly the plight of black families––would this, at least possibly, be the recitation of racist facts? Might not my litany of facts regarding the inner cities even begin to lead you to believe that blacks are lost, or incapable of saving themselves? Might my recitation of facts bias you against blacks; and might my recitation of facts also lead you to forget the broader causes of inner-city turmoil, perhaps even blinding you to the fact that inner-city blacks might in fact be living in a Warsaw ghetto, even a cage, surrounded by the barbed-wire of white institutional and political racism?

My broader point is that the caller to the Jay Severin radio program did something for me: he opened my mind to something I've never before seen or understood: statistics can not only lie, they may blind and mislead, and they may even fuel the very thing they were intended to suppress. Facts are not merely neutral, at least not always. When you hear the "facts" (from surveys) that the majority of Americans believed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that most Americans who believed such an Iraq connection also watch Fox News, you are not entitled to believe that these are offered in cool detachment: these facts are meant to sway, intimidate, upbraid and even dehumanize. And if a person states that 40 million fetuses have been killed since Roe v. Wade became law, that person surely intends to sway you. In fact, people always use facts in order to sway you, perhaps often ignoring other, broader facts that might help you frame your thoughts more completely. "Facts" of this kind are not neutral, and you know it all too well: it is a fact that John Kerry "voted for the war before he voted against it"; it is a fact that George Bush "was only" in the Air National Guard in Texas. You get the idea.

And while the caller did something for me, he did nothing for Jay Severin, though I think had Mr. Severin actually been a proper, high-bred host (he is from a moneyed family); had Mr. Severin listened, he may have understood something very interesting and important: It is never too late to have one's mind opened; it is a good thing for even a host to learn something from his guests. But sadly the distance between hosting and hostility is not very great. Too bad Mr. Severin (and others of his medium) cannot keep the two words farther apart. But at least one is comforted knowing that Mr. Severin's dictionary is always nearby.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

†Let it be noted that I am even wary of fabricating facts for the sake of hypotheses or analogies. Even repeating news of an old crime might prompt a return to that sort of crime for some sick, imitative mind dwelling among us.