Dee Bowman

Commentary

Consider the following two incidents: 1) You are invited to dinner by a woman living in a small town in the West, but the invitation contains the added information that it will "annoy" her racist friends and relatives that you are there. 2) A male graduate student at an Ivy League university in the East who wants to get his mother off his case about his love life decides to send her into an apoplectic fit as he laughingly tells you that he told her that his new girlfriend is "old, divorced and black."

The benign bigot is one who is racially offensive, but remains deliriously unaware of it. You just have to love them. From the subtle message in the 1970s-era "The Jeffersons," in which the white neighbor is acceptable as a spouse to a black woman only if he is a bumbling fool, to the present-day "Everybody Loves Raymond," where the hero smirks at his mother's racism when his brother starts dating his black female partner.

From the lack of respect from clerks who address you by your first name, even though there is a 40- to 50-year age difference, to the ignorance of a wannabe president's wife appearing for services at a black church wearing pants, the magnitude of their obviousness is staggering.

While they pat themselves on the back in their delusional misperceptions that they are unbiased, they say and do insensitive and thoughtless things, which they believe illustrate to their "some-of-my-best-friends" how bigoted other people are.

A current case in point is the nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general. The media has unilaterally declared that black people, while a part of this society, have remained unaffected by it -- that somehow the dreams and aspirations of black Americans have not been influenced by information in the same manner as the rest of society.

While the various civil rights bills and constitutional amendments supplemented, reinforced or implemented the right to life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness is the right most directly under our own control, regardless of ethnicity, and one of the most desirable aspects of happiness is to live free from fear and crime.

However, blacks and other minorities are portrayed as more tolerant of criminals and criminal behavior. This is absurd. The last thing anyone wants, minorities included, is a criminal living upstairs or next door.

In their need to be controversial, the electronic and print media characterized the minority population as consisting of only drug dealers, crackheads, welfare queens, gang-bangers, teen-age mothers, hookers, jailbirds, and absentee fathers. If, hypothetically, a third of all black people fit this description, there are still two-thirds who do not -- people who don't get media attention, who are bypassed in eyewitness, man-on-the-street opinion surveys in favor of the idiot most likely being interviewed.

These two-thirds are the people who were suddenly out there that no one knew existed who came to the defense of Clarence Thomas; who are as capable of saying "hang the bastard -- prisoners' rights be damned" as any right-wing, law-and-order conservative.

That Arkansas federal Judge Ronnie White would be soft on a four-time, sociopathic murderer is cause for concern for us all. When such a person is paroled he would hardly have the means to live in the affluent neighborhoods of judges and others who bring in the big bucks. Most likely this parolee would be the criminal upstairs or next door.

John Ashcroft evaluated Ronnie White's qualification for higher office and concluded that he was not sufficiently victim-sensitive. This is not racism. But to now say that Ronnie White was denied promotion because he is black is belittling, degrading, and demeaning to all black people, who are once again being used as the weapon in a benign bigot's attempts to be what he is not -- someone who focuses on what qualities and principles the person can bring to the table, not how much melanin his skin contains.

Dee Bowman is a resident of Temecula.

2/10/01