On Bigotry
By Robert Wright
There has to be an Imus event every once in a while. Ethnicity being the volatile thing it is, gratuitously inflammatory remarks have to be discouraged, so bounds of acceptable speech have to be clarified. Clarity comes when, inevitably, someone oversteps and gets slapped down.
Maybe this particular boundary could have been clarified with less punishment, given how abjectly Don Imus has apologized. Still, there had to be a price, and, compared with the prices paid in some multiethnic societies (remember Yugoslavia?), this is a bargain.
But is America’s machinery for stigmatizing bigotry really working coherently?
. . . Which brings us to Ann Coulter. Full disclosure: Ms. Coulter once cited an Op-Ed essay I wrote for this newspaper about the Danish cartoon controversy as evidence that people like me had “affection” for terrorists. Thus ended any claim I might have to evaluate her work objectively. If you want a subject on which I report and you decide, today’s not your day.
In a speech last year before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Ms. Coulter used the word “raghead.” This is a dual-use slur, applied to both Arabs and Muslims, but she was talking about an Iranian, so presumably she was focusing on the religious dimension (consistent with her post-9/11 advice that we “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”) The word raghead — whose only function is to denigrate — seems as legitimately offensive to Muslims as Mr. Imus’s utterance was to blacks. The difference is that Ms. Coulter didn’t apologize.
Brace yourself for the seismic damage done to her career.
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Robert Wright Imus Ann Coulter Politics Muslims Bigotry Racism Sexism Homophobia News
