Ethnic Etiquette

[formerlurker]

Ethnic Etiquette
The Sonia Sotomayor hearings were something of a snooze, so we suppose we can't blame the Associated Press for trying to come up with something--anything--to write about. Even so, this is a bit much. Yesterday the AP tried to transform some humorous banter into an outrage:

One of Sonia Sotomayor's Senate interrogators had a joking response Wednesday when she talked hypothetically--and humorously--about getting a gun to shoot him in self-defense.
"You'll have lots of 'splainin' to do," replied GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, evoking the 1950s TV show "I Love Lucy" to laughter from the crowd and the judge.
"I'd be in a lot of trouble, then," Sotomayor quipped back.
What Coburn said--and how he said it--was a riff on a Hispanic television character, Ricky Ricardo, whose accent is now widely considered a broad parody.
Ricky Ricardo, played by Cuban-born Desi Arnaz, would often use this line with his fictional wife, Lucy, played by real-life wife Lucille Ball. The AP successfully sought out a denunciation of Coburn's bon mot:

The National Council of La Raza [Spanish for "the race"] responded to an e-mail inquiring about Coburn's remark, saying it was unclear whether it was a badly told joke "or he's just clueless."
"While quoting Ricky Ricardo isn't in and of itself a slur, in this context, it seems wildly inappropriate to say the least," said the group's spokeswoman, Lisa Navarrete.
Meanwhile, the AP reports from Chicago that the Sears Tower "was renamed the Willis Tower on Thursday in a downtown ceremony":

Mayor Richard Daley and Joseph Plumeri, who heads Willis Group Holdings, the London-based insurance broker that secured the naming rights as part of its agreement to lease 140,000 square feet of space in the tower, unveiled a sign with the new name in the tower's lobby.
"Willis is investing in Chicago. Willis is investing in Chicago. That's positive," Plumeri said during Thursday's ceremony.
We doubt we'll ever call it Willis Tower. To this day we refuse to refer to the skyscrapers in our own backyard as the MetLife Building and the Fiat Building.

But we digress. What caught our attention about this AP story was the headline: "What You Talkin' Bout, Willis? Sears Tower Renamed." What the AP said--and how it said it--was a riff on a black television character, Arnold Jackson, whose accent is now widely considered a broad parody.

Podcast
James Taranto on ethnic etiquette.
Child actor Gary Coleman played Arnold in "Diff'rent Strokes," which debuted on NBC in 1978. Arnold and elder brother Willis (Todd Bridges) were the adopted children of a wealthy, WASPy widower, Philip Drummond (Conrad Bain). Whenever Arnold was incredulous at something his brother had said, he would employ the catchphrase the AP referenced in the headline (though the Internet Movie Database spells it "whatchoo" rather than "what you").

The AP dispatch with the ethnic sitcom reference in the headline ran yesterday--the same day as the AP dispatch about Coburn's ethnic sitcom reference. We don't find the AP headline "wildly inappropriate," but the AP's search for someone to describe Coburn's comment that way is wildly silly.

On a somewhat less silly note, the Hill reports on an unpleasant encounter in another Senate committee hearing:

The President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) tore into Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) Thursday for what he said were "condescending" and "God awful" racial statements at a hearing.
NBCC head Harry C. Alford took strong exception to Boxer having referenced an NAACP report favoring climate change legislation during a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which Boxer is the chairwoman.
"Madam chair, that is condescending to me," Alford said. "I'm the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and you're trying to put up some other black group to pit against me."
We watched the video, and we can see Alford's point. Boxer does come across as condescending, and, weirdly, she doesn't even seem to understand why he would find it offensive for her to rebut his argument not on the merits but via a racially specific appeal to authority.

Yet Alford, by speaking on behalf the National Black Chamber of Commerce, is himself relying on just such a racially specific appeal to authority. We tend to agree with Alford and disagree with Boxer on the subject they were discussing, but the rule of etiquette he invoked--blacks may claim authority on account of their race, but whites may not seek to undermine that authority--put her at an unfair disadvantage, one that was particularly unwarranted given that the topic at hand had nothing to do with race.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124785365597359241.html

[NHSparky]

IOW, we're not victimized enough, we've got to make shit up.

[Thor]

Used to be that people of all races would laugh or at least see the humor in many of those type remarks. Nowadays, they just whine, due to faux offense. But, in today's world, it's still ok to make ethnic jokes, as long as that ethnicity is WHITE!!