Hypocrisy

By Crispin Sartwell

Things have reached the point of full-bore hallucination in race relations. In Durban, the U.N. conference on race has disintegrated in recriminations, demonstrating if nothing else that the problem remains acute. Simultaneously, at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, fourth-seeded Lleyton Hewitt touched off a storm of controversy when he made "racially insensitive remarks."

First Hewitt. When he was called for a couple of foot-faults, Hewitt yelled at the line judge, and apparently pointed out that both the judge and Hewitt's opponent, James Blake, are black. He implied that the line judge favored Blake because of their common race.

This, as many commentators have pointed out, was unfortunate, especially as tennis, traditionally in the U.S. a white country club sport, is integrating dramatically.

But let's put the incident in perspective. Hewitt did not use any racial expletives or any racist language whatever. The television commentators were busy saying that this event might haunt the rest of Hewitt's career. And yet all he actually did, even on the worst construal, was to *notice,* out loud, that the judge and the player were both black.

Race relations have reached the point at which to notice someone's race out loud is actually taboo. Meanwhile, of course, Americana are all still hyper-aware of race all the time; we autonomically notice or try to puzzle out the race of every person we meet. We have reached Martin Luther King's ideal of a colorblind society in our talk, while living in the same old colorful world in our heads. In other words, we're liars and hypocrites.

This is a sad legacy of the civil rights movement; it has eventuated in ways to force people not to say what they're thinking. And if you think "force" is too strong a word, ponder the sort of vilification Hewitt is enduring, which will "haunt the rest of his career."

The idea that a black judge might consciously or unconsciously favor a black player, or for that matter a white judge a white player, is not insane, even if suggesting it is prohibited.

Meanwhile, the participation of the U.S. in the U.N. race conference was always half-hearted and grudging. Not because the people who run the country take themselves to be white racists, but because, as in the case of Hewitt, they prefer to pretend that they don't think about race at all.

The U.S. refused, from the beginning, to talk about reparations for slavery, because even to ponder the issue aloud is to acknowledge our history of racism and apartheid, and to acknowledge also that the legacy of slavery continues and that American culture is still racist. The idea, once again, is that if we don't mention it, it doesn't exist. That there is a racial or ethnic element in the Israeli repression of Palestinians is also something we'd simply prefer was not mentioned at all.

There are a variety of ways to solve problems. But pretending they don't exist and refusing to talk about them is not a particularly promising one. What the race problem needs now is a whole lot fewer liberal or conservative taboos on speech and a whole lot more brutally frank conversation.

We have reached the point at which no one can say what everybody is thinking, the point of total dishonesty, in which the race problem is addressed exclusively by speech codes. When something happens that shows us that race is still an issue, we'd better stop pretending to be surprised.

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