As I write, Frank Schnatter, CEO and Founder of Papa John’s Pizza has resigned in disgrace one day after the press and social media announced that he had said a word. It was, needless to say, the “N” word.
Reports David Harten of USA Today:
“Schnatter was asked during a May conference call to role-play through scenarios to help him learn to respond to questions about racial issues. Asked how he would distance himself from racist groups online, Schnatter was quoted as saying that Colonel Harland Sanders had referred to blacks using the N-word, but the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder never faced a backlash. But instead of saying “N-word,” Schnatter used the offensive word.”
Apparently the conference call was a matter of sensitivity training: Schnatter was taking it to be even more careful about inclusivity than the usual diversity-intoxicated CEO. He wasn’t using the word in anger, or to insult or humiliate anyone. Following good liberal practice, he was trying to distance himself from those despicable racists. Further following good liberal practice, he pointed at another well-known business owner who had used the term, and Mr. Schnatter pointed, and shrieked, right on cue. Unfortunately Schnatter quoted the former speaker’s actual words when doing so and didn’t handle the radioactive noun with the insulating gloves of ‘the “N” word,” a usage mandatory for white Americans, though black Americans seem to use the same term with comparative leeway.
Schnatter, a self-made billionaire whose Papa John’s franchises include over 4,700 stores, 3,500 in the U.S. and over 1,200 in nearly 40 other countries and territories, is now not only gone from the company he founded, but is off the Board of the University of Louisiana as well. The mayor of Jeffersonville, Indiana (Schnatter’s hometown) has had Schnatter’s name removed from the historic fieldhouse for whose restoration Schnatter had donated $800,000. Whether from shock at the “N” word, or shock at having its highly effective and successful corporate leader depart overnight, Papa John’s stock has plunged.
Further details can be Googled, but no need. One has seen this Kabuki before, and will again. As with so many stories nowadays, the real story is not so much the event as the invisible dynamic underlying it–the radical unfreedom in the Home of the Free, the extralegal lines that cannot be transgressed without expulsion from a closed “open society” that will not examine and cannot even name them. In short: the massive persecuting authority of the persecuted.
Politics strives to be logical, aligning means to ends. Society, though, is extralogical: as Hegel pointed out, it consists of contradictory and evolving elements in constant interaction with one another. Social rules don’t have to make sense. If they’re generally accepted, they’re generally accepted, and the rules of the game are what they are. The question, though, is why certain rules arise at all, and why their transient hegemony can attain to such brief force.
The idea of bigotry, of racism, is a classic such socio-historic puzzle. When was it exactly that bigot and racist became the terms of absolutely slam-dunk final rejection from humanity, stripping the target not just of legal or human rights like that of free speech, but of any and all human value whatever? Blasphemy is fine these days; sodomy is celebrated in street parades; a doctor can abort 10,000 fetuses and get a Humanitarian of the Year award. Pedophiles can not only have their say on HuffPo, but run for Congress. Yet if one simply dislikes a category of people, one is beyond (dare I say it) the pale.
This may be a given, but, cooly considered, is it not also strange? I can’t recall the last time anyone considered describing a bigoted comment as being simply mistaken, or a bigot as someone making an intellectual error that could be ignored as merely silly, or handled by debating it with an open mind in mutually polite peaceful public discussion. No, bigotry is invariably framed as some sort of daemoniac ur-hatred burbling up from the vulpine Id–not merely a punishable hate crime, or even a matter of punishable hate speech, but publicly punishable hate thought, the mere accusation of which suffices for conviction and permanent expulsion.
But why should mere subjective aversion for some people become a matter of social criminalization, any more than distaste for beer or bores or Baroque? After all, is it not possible–indeed, is it not common–for people to dislike others, even avoid them, and yet deal with them fairly and politely? Judges surely dislike the drug dealers and wife beaters brought before them, and take pains not to associate with them off the bench. Are they bigots? They address them politely in court and seem for the most part to adjudicate their cases with dispassion.
A bigot is a person with an opinion. Why is our reaction not, merely, “So what? Who cares what they think?” I like Chinese cuisine, you like soul food. What’s the big deal? Pile on your grits and enjoy. But merely say, “I prefer Chinese people to black people,” and boom! There goes tenure, the spot on the Board, the job, captaincy of the firm. And it goes even if there is no evidence whatever of criminal injury or even (were it even possible to prove) intent.
A recent book by professors Sander Gilman and James Thomas, “Are Racists Crazy?” takes this into truly Orwellian directions:
In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that – based on their clinical experiment – the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine cited the study, posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness?
Time wasn’t the only source asking that question. Debate soon erupted as to whether we need to screen for racism beforehand and apply medication as needed. Forcible medication for politically incorrect opinions? The torture room of A Clockwork Orange is hardly what we once envisioned liberal society as being.
When “the charge of bigotry” is raised, it always puzzles me that the charge involves such a disconnection–almost an abyss–between opinion and deed. If I hate someone someone for having black skin, or white skin, or no skin, and hit him in the head with a brick, surely that is a crime because it is a crime, not because of the hatred–much less the presumed nature of the hatred–assumed to be behind it. If my feelings don’t issue forth in active palpable injury, why does they merit violent condemnation–condemnation often much more violent than the subjective disdain itself?
When someone is labeled a bigot, there are calls to shun them, shame them, fire them from their jobs, remove their books from libraries, ban them from media, refuse them restaurant service, badger them at home, physically confront them, punch them, and so on and so on. Weirdly, these are classically the very actions of bigotry, yet the actors are celebrated if they do it in the name of combatting bigotry. The persecution of people for their opinions, even if the opinions are stupid and distasteful, even as we counsel and celebrate active persecution, even unto drug treatment, seems to me one of those mirror-image reversals where the punishment not only doesn’t fit the crime–it is the crime. Not least, a crime against simple logic. “We cannot tolerate those who cannot tolerate!” Huh?
Since I’m trying to be honest rather than politically correct, I must honestly say that I find America and Americans absolutely permeated with prejudice and obsessed with race. Maybe the general population has a subliminal sense that the deep aversion they actually feel for each other is so deep and vivid that they fear that striking any match, even the utterance of a word, will set the whole nation aflame. Maybe so, but one doesn’t resolve a serious illness by muting the expression of any symptom.
Let no one think I am presenting racism as merely an amiable eccentricity. One has every right to fault racism and criticize and disagree with racists. It may reasonably be objected that words do indeed lead to deeds, and that the racist opinions of today will egg on the lynching party of tomorrow. All one can say about that is that while the thesis sounds reasonable, the evidence is thin. There have only been two lynchings since 1951, and surely it isn’t because there have been no unkind comments about racial groups during that time. One can argue with equal plausibility that imposing mass censorship on those with negative feelings about other groups both aggravates those individuals, and makes violence more likely, not less. The need for society to give itself over wholly to such active self-censorship remains a case to be made.
But the psychic need is another story. This social dementia of racism and anti-racism can be workable and endurable dementias provided those affected can moderate not their expression, but their behavior. If white person A chooses to pay ten times the housing prices to flee to suburb B so as to avoid black person C, it seems to me he is shooting himself in the foot and being rather dumb, but society doesn’t fly apart, as it does in the case of Yugoslavian ethnic cleansing. If black person C hates his Jewish landlord D and subscribes to the Farrakhan channel on Youtube, it seems to me he could make better use of his time. But if he’s not burning down synagogues or invading the Sudetenland, will society not endure? Aversion without teeth may still bite, but it doesn’t draw blood, and that at least leaves a society functional.
Changing people’s feelings is well nigh impossible; if you disagree, take a minute and try, really and sincerely and honestly try, to feel deep and gurgling love for the chair you are sitting on, or (if you are a liberal) for Donald Trump. What you’ll find is that you can’t make yourself feel something you don’t. But you do have a measure of control over your language, your manners, your actions. It seems to me that if Americans stopped trying to police their own and others’ thoughts, acknowledged their social preferences and prejudices, and adopted the medical motto of doing no tangible harm rather than monitoring their own and other’s crimethink, they’d be a happier and less crazy nation.
But instead we seem to be in the chiliastic grip of a will to psychic purification, a neo-abolitionist ache to scrub our minds and everyone else’s spotless. This is very likely a fruit of the decline of religious faith, a misdirected religious impulse taking its passion and irrationalism elsewhere, underneath the sheep’s clothing of politics. Only we forget that that sheep is a wolf.