If only we could take it back...

People make dumb comments a lot. We all do it--things we say and the minute it comes out of our mouths we realize that we sound like an ass or can be misconstrued to sound like an ass. Or we say things in the heat of the moment or in our younger, wilder, more ignorant days. Or, in some cases, we are coldly calculating and we mean to sound like an ass to be manipulative.

I start in this more humanist, universal way to remind myself that when I get righteous about the dumb things that people say, particularly about the racist (or racially coded and therefore implicated in a racial and racist hierarchy) things that people say, that I, too, have said things that have offended and hurt and shamed others.

But then again, I'm not a public figure (or I suppose as a professor, even an anonymous professor of Southern U I'm semi-public).

Recently there was a really IDIOTIC thing that got said about Tiger Woods by Kelly Tilghman (Golf Network anchor). Tilghman was bantering with another ex-pro golfer, Nick Faldo, at a golf tournament about Tiger Woods' dominance on the PGA tour and what younger golfers would need to do to beat Tiger (who has been for all intents and purposes, unbeatable, indominatable, untouchable). Faldo said that the young golfers would have to gang up on Tiger, and Tilghman made a remark that I'm sure she (and the rest of us) is regretting ever crossed her lips:

"Yeah, lynch him in a back alley"

Yes, a white female former pro-golfer, born and raised in South Carolina, who attended Duke University on a golf scholarship, and who has been on friendly terms with Tiger for a dozen years, made a stupid racist remark. On the face of it, some are saying it isn't racist because there wasn't malicious intent. In other words, Tilghman clearly wasn't suggesting that anyone should seriously try to string Woods up from a tree. Others are trying to claim that the word "lynch" doesn't really carry a particular racial connotation--that one can lynch people of any race.

But I mean, c'mon...really? A young woman born and raised in the South, whose parents owned a golf course in South Carolina, who attended Duke University in Durham, NC, she wouldn't be aware of how charged that word is, and she wouldn't be aware that making that comment about Woods, whom almost everyone sees as an African American golfer (the exceptions being those who try to recognize Tiger's bi-raciality or "cablinasian-ness" and the even fewer people who claim him as a member of the Asian American tribe), would be seen as violent and racist and just NOT FUNNY (some people are saying that because she was laughing when she made the remark it proves she didn't mean any harm). So making the suggestion, even in jest, even about a friend, that he should be "lynched," of course seems like a racist remark, because the whole act of lynching is steeped in racism. And even if we regard it as a thing of the "past," it's still not funny. And really, it's not a thing of the past. Lets look at some contemporaneous examples of lynching, and here it does cross racial lines because in 1982 there was a Chinese American girl in Chapel Hill, NC who was strung up to a tree and in 1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay white man, was tied to fence posts and left for dead and also in 1998 James Byrd, an African American man, was dragged behind a pick-up truck to his death (yes, technically both Shepard and Byrd were not tied to a tree, but I think their deaths--a result of extreme hatred due to their minoritized status (gay in one instance, black in another) are in the same vein as lynching.

So does that make Tilghman a racist and are her remarks just as damaging as Don Imus'? I bring up Imus because Al Sharpton used him as an example, claiming that Tilghman's remarks were just as bad as Imus and that like Imus she should be fired.

I don't know if Tilghman is more or less of a racist than Imus or more or less of a racist than anyone else. But I don't think that Tilghman's comments are the same as Imus'. Imus made racist and sexist comments about a group of college women. Tilghman made a racist remark about a multimillionaire golf champion. And Tilghman had a much smaller audience--the world of people who pay attention to golf is much smaller than Imus's audience. And Tilghman is a young woman, and I believe this is her first gaff, whereas Imus had been known for making regularly racist and offensive remarks.

I am contextualizing all of this, not because I'm trying to give Tilghman a "pass" or to say her remark was OK--it wasn't. And the Golf Channel has suspended her for two weeks as a result. She has apologized to her audience and apologized to Tiger Woods in person. And Tigers' "people" (his agent) has said that he holds no ill feelings towards Tilghman and has put the matter past him. And I don't think that just because Tiger is not upset that means other people shouldn't be upset. But I think I'm making all of these qualifications for this simple reason:

I wasn't even going to blog about this--mostly because I felt like other blogs had taken care of this issue (most notably Angry Asian Man). It wasn't until a reader of this blog emailed me and told me to check it out that I started to dig into the story. And when I read that people thought Tilghman should be fired for the same reason Imus was fired, I just felt like it wasn't the same--it didn't feel the same to me.

None of us wants to rank oppression--or rather, I don't. I don't want to say that one racist incident was worse than another or that one group experiences racism in a worse way than another. On the other hand, I have to say that in my experience, I do not have racist things said to me in, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the same way as my African American peers. I simply don't know what it's like to experience racism as an African American person. And I will go out on a limb and say that the instances of "Orientalizing" that I do experience (people asking me where I'm from or what language I speak) is minor in comparison to incidents that my African American friends have shared with me (for instance, to the best of my knowledge I've never been pulled over for driving for any random reason, I don't have people follow me in a department store, people don't assume I got into college through affirmative action, etc...).

But I don't know...I had this whole response typed out and then started talking to my white Southern boyfriend about all of this and he is OUTRAGED that Tilghman said this (and believes that with her background, she must have a fair degree of racism since he believes many white Southerners have internalized a fair amount of racism against black Americans and I guess he should know) and according to him "there's an undercurrent of racism in the South" that people just know about--and that especially someone like Tilghman should know better and should NEVER joke about lynching because it's extremely pointed, extremely racist, and should never be joked about, ever.

So I guess now I'm curious, should Tilghman be fired for what she said and is it as bad as/worse than Don Imus's remarks? Because I guess I'm contextualizing--looking at Tilghman's career versus Imus's career, and to me, there's no excuse for Imus and no real desire on his part to learn and be truly sorry and to educate himself. Whereas with Tilghman, well maybe there's hope. Maybe she will realize how wrong and how potentially damaging her remarks are. But am I also justifying her comments because I think it was a "first offense," because she's friendly with Tiger, because golf seems like such a smaller sphere, because I don't know what it's like to experience racism as an African American and didn't grow up in the South? How blind am I being to my own internalized racism and prejudices (which I hate to admit, and part of me was thinking of even deleting this whole post, because it's hard to admit your own blind spots, but I figure I should lay it all out here because if I can't be honest with myself about my internalized stuff, who can I be honest with? And I should let my blog readers call me on my bs as well).

I suppose I'll just end by asking anyone out there in the blogosphere to chime in with your thoughts and opinions, and perhaps the greater question: why does this all matter? I think it does, and I have my own opinions on this, but I'd like to know what anyone else has to say (and I may pick up this thread when I start to talk about "benign Orientalism," so be on the lookout.