Rinku Sen

Incompetence Covers Racism

For a moment, media coverage of Hurricane Katrina helped people realize that racism and poverty exist right here in America. I hoped that moment would last long enough for us to expand that realization beyond the disaster.

Before that could happen, a new line appeared in the debate: George Bush and the feds were incompetent rather than racist. In a September 8 editorial, the Chicago Tribune decried Jesse Jackson and Kanye West (interestingly, they didn't pick Harry Connick Jr. or Celine Dion, who also pointed out the racial implications). The editorial praised Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) for calling out the "unconscionable ineptitude" that aggravated "the chasm between the haves and the have-nots" revealed in Katrina's wake. All the people I know who didn't want to acknowledge the racial dimensions of Katrina also cited incompetence.

This line is spreading to other issues and other conservatives. On Alternet, J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, a writer I respect, said that the term "racist" should not be applied to Bill Bennett's assertion that aborting black babies would drive down the crime rate. Allen-Taylor's point was a little different from the Tribune's -- "racism used to mean white peoples' hatred of black people", he wrote; now it is overused, means nothing and is often pulled out to chastise blacks as the new racists. Allen-Taylor would have called Bennett stupid or wrong instead.

Using "incompetence" is appealing because it doesn't make us prove motivation -- an impossible task in times when the discussion of race is so coded, when images (think welfare queen) have made words unnecessary. Unless you can live in Bill Bennett's head while he looks at a black person and thinks "criminal," goes this line of reasoning, you cannot prove that he is racist, and therefore you cannot ethically bring race into the conversation. If you can't bring race in, then you can't argue for race-conscious structural solutions that would, gosh!, save a lot of poor white folk too. Claiming incompetence gives our public officials an out, as when men say they couldn't possibly do the housework because they'd be so bad at it.

But the measure of a man's racism is in his policies, not in his motivation. Bush knows that public sector funding cuts hurt blacks more than whites because blacks are disproportionately poorer. We saw it clearly when Katrina hit, yet he now pushes policies that privatize the rebuilding. The highlights of Bennett's career were the war on drugs, cutting bilingual education, and arguing for school vouchers, all policies with actual or potential devastating effects on people of color. Impact, not intent, is the measure we need to use, and incompetence isn't the word that comes to mind.

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Posted at 7:23 PM, Oct 13, 2005 in Civil Rights
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