Wonkette Gets It Right

As a pointless controversy continues to rage on the blogs over the shocking revelation that racists can come in all colors, thanks to the contribution to public discourse of one Kenneth Eng, the folks at Wonkette hit just the right tone to comment on this non-story ...

People are so touchy and PC these days, you can’t even write a column in a San Francisco ethnic newspaper about how much you hate black people without Nancy Pelosi denouncing you in the national media. What a nation of whiners!

Yeah, everybody's so oversensitive these days! The PC police are really getting out of hand!

I also love the coda to the Wonkette piece:

“Speech that promotes hate has no place in San Francisco or anywhere in our country,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Eng’s words were not only offensive to African Americans, but to all Americans.” And then Eng got fired and racism was ended. The End.

And every surbuban princess got her pink pony, and swords turned into ploughshares, and the lion lay down with the lamb, and we all lived happily ever after ...

The quick and vocal condemnation of Kenneth Eng by Asian-American groups is most encouraging, but the only thing really noteworthy about this Kenneth Eng chap isn't the existence of Asian-Americans addicted to the racial resentment favored by the likes of the Klan or the Nation of Islam - choose any two groups of any size by any criterion and you'll always find idiots who hate everyone else in "the other" camp - but that the editors of Asian Week were neither troubled in the least by what Eng had to say, nor were they at all conscious of the possibility that their readership would be offended by it. Still, is it really a revelation that there are substantial numbers of <pick your immigrant community of choice here> who have an insular and bigoted mindset towards "outsiders"?

It's precisely the predictability of the typical opinion on this issue which makes the Wonkette take on it stand out: as an example of the sort of racist nonsense the disingenuous all too often try to pass under the radar these days under the pose of defying a mostly mythical "political correctness", Eng's bilge serves extremely well. Most accusations of "PC" are just the resentful mutterings of bigots irritated at the fact that they can't spill their prejudices without fear of being on the end of any negative feedback.

Comments

[Neel Krishnaswami]

"Most accusations of 'PC' are just the resentful mutterings of bigots irritated at the fact that they can't spill their prejudices without fear of being on the end of any negative feedback."

This is quite true, and is one of the reasons it is so much harder to oppose ill-conceived campus speech codes than it should be. You have to spend as much energy refuting these "allies" as your opponents.