Patterico's Pontifications

12/20/2014

Eugene Volokh on Conversations on Race

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 12:59 pm



Eugene Volokh has a long and typically sensible post about “conversations on race” at his Washington Post blog, titled Let’s have a national conversation about race — so we can figure out whom to fire. The springboard for his post is the firing of a North Carolina fire investigator for writing, on her personal Facebook page, that Michael Brown was a “thug” — and criticizing the Obama administration for sending representatives to Brown’s funeral. Volokh writes that he thinks she is “likely to prevail” in the lawsuit she is contemplating against her government employers. Volokh then quotes at length from a 2010 post he wrote about the legal pitfalls of engaging in one of those “conversations about race” around the water cooler.

At the end, Eugene has an update:

UPDATE: Commenter MDJ23 writes:

I think you are taking the national conversation or water cooler suggestion too literally. The point is that those who have suffered racial discrimination should speak out, not that those who have not should speak out — the latter’s role should mostly be to listen. Some might call that a lecture; I’d call it an education.

Oh, that’s the “conversation” that people are contemplating — this helps explain things.

Heh. Well, of course that’s the conversation they want — and Eugene knows that. He’s just making his point with a rhetorical flourish of extreme understatement, which is both safe and effective (sounds like the properties of a good over-the-counter medication, doesn’t it?).

The one side doesn’t really want to hear from the other. They want to talk at us — lecture, “educate,” or whatever — and they want us to shut up and listen.

I myself have expressed in the past a desire to not have a national conversation on race. Here are a couple of examples of why.

Last year, when a black columnist wrote a column about “rules” for engaging in such a conversation, it turned out that her “rules” addressed only how to talk to black people. (She described her column as “even-handed” because it told both whites and blacks how to talk to black people about race.) I asked her if she had any rules for talking to white people, and she told me to write them myself and then blocked me on Twitter. (Hooray for “conversations”!)

I was called a “racist” in 2009 when I described Henry Louis Gates as a “high-on-himself Harvard professor” based on the arresting officer’s statement:

Gates then turned to me and told me that I had no idea who I was ‘messing’ with and that I had not heard the last of it.

I have had the delightful experience of having people complain to my employer that I am a racist. This has happened on more than one occasion. Fortunately, my employers have been more sensible than the employers of the fire investigator in North Carolina.

When we reform our legal system so that conversations on race are not an invitation to frivolous lawsuits, let me know, and maybe I’ll engage. Until then, I’ll pass, thanks.

18 Responses to “Eugene Volokh on Conversations on Race”

  1. Ding.

    Patterico (9c670f)

  2. Just watched “Brian’s Song” last night with my teenage son., and I think it’s a great conversation on race. We both watched mostly in silence, and got a bit teary of course, but the only question he asked was “What are chitlins?”

    Johnny Mustard (e2a87c)

  3. My dad, who is white, grew upin the coal fields of Kentucky and knows all about Chitlins (or Chitterlings),

    I am very thankful that while I still love pinto beans and cornbread, I never “had the opportunity” to eat chittlins.
    I have, on a few occasions, had the opportunity to visit a home when they were being cooked… I am glad it was very few occasions…

    MD in Philly (f9371b)

  4. Chitlins, according to Wikipedia, are small intestines of a pig or other animal that are stewed or fried. It is considered a soul food in the black American community.

    The national conversation on race, as well as Volokh’s position, remind me of the 1956 Hundred Flowers Campaign in Red China during which expressing opinions on the communist regime was encouraged. Then, once the holders of opinions critical to the regime were identified, they were punished with criticism, incarceration, or even death. Every watercooler should have a sign posted nearby that says “Mao 1956.”

    Denver Todd (5f001f)

  5. …criticizing the Obama administration for sending representatives to Brown’s funeral.

    I’ll point out that the Obama administration did not send representatives to Thatcher’s funeral.

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  6. with all this amnesty the really important failmerican minorities are the hispanic ones not the african american ones

    society needs to catch up

    happyfeet (831175)

  7. word on the street is oprah is taking spanish classes

    happyfeet (831175)

  8. Having lived through the civil rights era, I know there is a vast gulf between the “Greatest Generation” of whites, who were brought up and formed their values in the Jim Crow era, and their children, the “Boomers”, who formed their values in the 60’s and whom Dr King’s message was largely aimed at.

    They called it the “Generation Gap” and race was a decided part of it. Many many white households were torn by this debate. Archie Bunker vs Meathead has a lot of history behind it.

    If we are going to have a Conversation on Race, one of the subjects needs to be how whites came to turn on Jim Crow. Doctor King has a holiday not because he freed blacks from Jim Crow, but because he freed the nation from it.

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  9. hola! yo soy oprah!

    si se puede!

    um

    let us now welcome senor mister jorge rahmos

    oprahfeet (831175)

  10. It is not necessary to be black to experience racism. White, male, and in Japan will do nicely. Or being in England with a Catholic Irish surname. There was a time in years past when I was dating a black lady when I got the by-blows of racist attitudes, almost always from recent immigrants.

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  11. Our Philadelphia physician wrote:

    My dad, who is white, grew upin the coal fields of Kentucky and knows all about Chitlins (or Chitterlings),

    I am very thankful that while I still love pinto beans and cornbread, I never “had the opportunity” to eat chittlins.
    I have, on a few occasions, had the opportunity to visit a home when they were being cooked… I am glad it was very few occasions…

    Pinto beans and cornbread are wonderful. My darling bride (of 35 years, 7 months and one day) and I will be retiring back to our new Kentucky home in a few years, and a return to Southern cooking will be most definitely appreciated. (But I’ve managed to avoid chitterlings myself.)

    Anyone anywhere near Clay City, Kentucky, needs to go to Kathy’s Country Kitchen for the biscuits and gravy and the fried green tomatoes.

    The Dana who grew up in Kentucky (1b79fa)

  12. i’m so jelly there’s not enough peabnut bubber in chicago to go wif me

    oprahfeet (831175)

  13. oprah go away

    so over you

    happyfeet (831175)

  14. I’ll be happy to have a conversation about race and the 4 years I spent living in Harlem as a white man … grew up in the south and I saw more black on white racism in those 4 years in Harlem than I ever saw white on black racism in my 20+ years in the south … the black community respects violence and disrespects the law and the police … until that changes we can expect to have to shoot alot of Brown clones … Brown was a thug and the community should be erecting a statue to Officer Wilson …

    KaiserDerden (faa0ee)

  15. I grew up in South America where I wasn’t called Norteamericano, I was called Gringo. That was mostly by kids. The parents were too polite to call me that directly. But the kids learned it somewhere. Both can be epithets or just casual designations. It’s more about the manner of use (and manners) than the word, just as it is with equivalent terms from American culture.

    It was clearly a racial epithet the way it was shouted at a stranger.

    Bothered me a little. I got over it. And I got a lot of them over it too by getting to know them.

    Never ate chitlins despite living in the South for decades. On the other hand, I was fed its South American equivalent multiple times on business trips. Didn’t much care for that “delicacy.” I got my business acquaintances (never was sure if they were really sharing a delicacy with me or enjoying tormenting an American) to stop when I started politely declining and turning the table on them by asking if they’d even eaten monkey and telling some stories of my own from parts of their world that they had never experienced (sort of like Yankees disparaging Southerners when they had never actually been in the South.)

    Yeah, conversations on race and racial discrimination only work when both parties are actually interested in sharing experiences and opinions, not when one is just looking to do some sort of coup counting.

    Dan (00fc90)

  16. I am increasingly convinced that the best thing which can be done to improve race relations in the United States is for everyone to focus a lot less on race relations.

    This is, I believe, a logical corollary of Chief Justice Roberts’ concise and perfectly apt prescriptive in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

    If the federal and state governments comprising the United States actually obeyed the Fourteenth Amendment — if tomorrow, by magic, every government form and record and regulation and law stop sorting people on the basis of race, as the Amendment explicitly requires — I think that would go a long way toward persuading people, in their private lives and conversations, that there might be more useful and productive things for us to obsess over than race.

    But I shan’t hold my breath.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  17. They don’t really want a conversation. They want a lecture. Because, shut up.

    JD (c501ee)

  18. The six secrets to getting people to listen to you are simple:

    1. Listen before talking.
    2. Really listen, and understand.
    3. Listen so well you can make their argument in your own words, even if you don’t agree with it.
    4. You’re still listening? Good, keep listening while you think.
    5. Speak softly, shortly, and sensibly; and then,

    6. Listen.

    Thanks, Mom and Dad. “God gave you two ears, two eyes, a nose, and one mouth. That’s a clue!”

    htom (9b625a)


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