While driving between meetings yesterday, I listened to the first part of Keri Miller’s interview with Juan Williams.
Williams, of course, was the commentator who split his time between Fox News and National Public Radio – even serving as a talk show host on NPR on occasion – before being fired for admitting on the O’Reilly show to sharing many Americans’ nervousness about obvious Muslims on aircraft after 9/11 (while stressing – and the media reports, especially NPR’s, always left this part out – that it’d be wrong to base policy on the sort of stereotypes he was admitting to).
I’m going to paraphrase the part I heard. Feel free to validate it at the show link.
MILLER: So why did you revert to stereotype? Do you think that elevates the conversation?
WILLIAMS: Because we can’t have an honest conversation as a nation until we admit to the fact that this is how we feel.
MILLER: So why did you revert to stereotype? Do you think that elevates the conversation?
WILLIAMS: Now, let’s be honest – there was more than “reverting to stereotype”. I urged people to remember that’s now how we set policy in this country.
MILLER: So why did you revert to stereotype? Do you think that elevates the conversation?
WILLIAMS: In and of itself, I don’t. But it’s an honest part of the conversation; if political correctness forces us to stifle acknowledging it, it’ll leak out in other ways.
MILLER: So why did you revert to stereotype? Do you think that elevates the conversation?
WILLIAMS: Um…hello?
Miller’s point seemed to be not so much that humans must conquer stereotype; it’s that having them, or at least admitting it, is itself a base, evil thing.
I’d love to propose an experiment.
Some evening when Ms. Miller is making her way from The Loft and one of her “Talking Volumes” programs to a brie and chablis tasting party in Kenwood, she should run across a group of thirtysomething white males in full biker gear, smack across her path. Let’s measure her heart rate. See if she is indulging in any stereotypes.
In the interest of science, naturally.
UPDATE: Over on Twitter, “NarnFan” wrote the summary for this piece that I wasn’t caffeinated enough to hatch myself:
To the extent we can’t hold a complected thought about this stuff, we are screwed manifold ways.
People can yell “racist” at one another ’til they’re blue in the face; the fact is, it’s human nature to be “we-ist”. People are always most comfortable around people most like themselves; Keri Miller would no doubt be no more comfortable and relaxed among, say, white rednecks than would Cornell West.
Especially if there’s a “history”; Armenians might be forgiven for being leery of Turks; European Jews of a certain age might keep Russians, Poles or “Aryans” under close watch; blacks of any socioeconomic class in Los Angeles might be forgiven for being wary of tattooed, teenage and twentysomething Latinos.
Americans were attacked, and 3,000 of us murdered in cold blood, by people who caught us at our most vulnerable – stripped of weapons, jammed like cattle into aluminum tubes. Not every Muslim attacked us – and I’ll strenuously exclaim that many Muslims serve this country with great honor, including the Pakistani-American who was reported to have gone on the Bin Laden raid.
To say “you are a bad person” for acknowledging the real human need to see to one’s own self-preservation, itself, retards the conversation that Ms. Miller said she was trying to “advance”.
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