There's no telling by now many schools and libraries have banned Flannery O'Connor's classic short story "The Artificial Nigger" from their reading lists--many of them, one suspects, without reading any of it beyond that perfectly provocative, politically incorrect title. All our ever-vigilant Thought Police needed to get it banned throughout the country was the mention of the unmentionable N-word in its title.
Never mind that, like all of Flannery O'Connor's work, this story is really about the sacred, the redemptive, and how, as Scripture tells us, it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God--and worse, like the rare Flannery O'Connors among us, know it. But the censors probably never got past the title before clicking into action. Like a kneejerk reflex.
The title character of the story turns out to be inanimate--one of those lawn jockeys that used to be found in front yards and country estates. Not even whitewashing their faces was enough to make them socially acceptable. On the contrary, it made them stand out even more, like a confession that their original color had to be hidden.
Now, in these supposedly post-racial times, the president of an NAACP chapter in Spokane, Wash., has been outed; she's accused of trying to pass as black, even though her birth certificate identifies her as white. Once again things have come full circle. And once again a largely artificial social construct--race--has been confused with an immutable biological fact. Why not just let the lady choose whatever racial identity she prefers? The Hon. Barack Obama did.
Even better, why ask questions about race at all? As if somebody's "race" were anybody's business but his own. Granted, the collection of racial statistics may have some use in, say, determining how segregated or integrated or neither our schools may be, but its usefulness diminishes daily as more and more school districts get out from under a court's jurisdiction and concentrate on educating their students regardless of race, color or ethnicity.
Granted, our Artificial Black Woman may have been playing games with her racial identity all along to secure preferment, but that doesn't justify sticking with a race-based system. Why not just forget this whole race business? It only confuses matters.
To quote Chief Justice John Roberts' memorable line in one of his better opinions for the Supreme Court of the United States, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." And stop confusing a social/political/legal category with a biological one. Or would that be unspeakably simple?
To sum up this little imbroglio up in Washington state, the lady in Spokane was accused of adopting an artificial social identity in place of the artificial social identity she was assigned in the first place. And now she's had to resign as president of her NAACP chapter.
Could we please stop this verbal merry-round long enough to let some of us off? I don't know about you, but I'm getting dizzy.
The news of late seems full of poseurs, and that includes the obituary columns, which included this notice the other day: Jim Wright, 92. Goodness. I hadn't heard that name in years, and hadn't missed hearing it, either. The former majority leader, then speaker of the House, embodied just about all that was wrong with his party during the Reagan years--its ideological obstinacy, its obstructionism, and finally its corruption.
Jim Wright was forced to resign the speakership after it was revealed that he'd come up with a new way to get around the House's limits on gifts: He sold copies of his autobiography (and he was as poor a writer as he had been a political leader) in bulk to those who were interested in helping him get around the rules--at a royalty fee of 55 percent each. Or as he put it: "Royalty proceeds are going to my favorite charity: Mrs. Wright and me."
The former speaker was back in the papers the other day--the obituary column. Nil nisi bonum is the old rule: Speak nothing but good of the dead. Though in Jim Wright's case, you might have to really search for it. Surely there were many who loved the man, and certainly many in his Texas district who voted for him. And there is always something delightful about the shamelessness of a genuine scamp that entertains. And that Jim Wright did, even as his actions appalled.
Then there was the case of Clayton Kelly, 29, of Pearl, Miss., a blogger who claimed he just wanted to make a name for himself as a journalist--and certainly did. A despicable name. He snuck into a nursing home to make a video of Senator Thad Cochran's bedridden wife during a hotly contested primary election over in Mississippi; she was scarcely in a position to object, immobilized as she was by dementia. The video was then used to suggest that Senator Cochran was having an affair while his poor wife was wasting away. Nice guy, Mr. Kelly.
Now a judge has thrown the book at Clayton Kelly, 29, of Pearl, Miss., as His Honor should have--and given him the maximum penalty for conspiring to produce and exploit this shameful video. Mr. Kelly is to do two and a half years in prison, the other half on probation. Sometimes there is justice in this world.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 06/19/2015