Homo

By Crispin Sartwell

In an interview to be published in New York magazine, Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey calls Bill Parcells - formerly of the Giants and now coaching their hated rivals the Dallas Cowboys - a "homo." The outrage caused by this remark has been extreme and, apparently, universal. Shockey himself first denied that he said it, then said he was joking.

Let me suggest to you that the outrage - much of it expressed on the nation's sports pages and sports television networks - is utterly dishonest. Almost wherever you get a bunch of heterosexual men or boys together, they swap gay jokes. They call each other homos. They impugn one another's masculinity. They describe in detail one another's supposed homosexual acts. This is true in locker rooms, and it's true in news rooms.

I am raising a little swarm of male teenagers, including a football player. They and their friends talk this way all the time. I mean, *all* the time. We've talked to them about sexual orientation and respect. It doesn't seem to have changed much of anything. To be vaguely honest about it, I talk that way myself from time to time.

The outrage amounts to this: Shockey should not talk in public the way we all talk in private. That is what our goodness and lack of prejudice amounts to: a resolution to conceal our real thoughts, our real words, our real jokes, and our real selves. It is not too much to say, in fact, that these resolutions more or less entirely constitute American public discourse as a kind of fog of hypocrisy.

The civil rights movement with regard to race was admirable in innumerable respects, but it had certain unintended consequences. It certainly did not eradicate racism: racism in our culture is structural and chronic: consult, on this matter, imprisonment rates or income statistics. But it did drive racist speech out of public discourse entirely. The only white people who would publicly utter the word "nigger" now are insane white supremacists. (And if the newspaper in which you are reading this did not print the word "nigger," it's not because I didn't write it. So you see what I mean.)

In fact, when it comes to race, all of us white folks now intone the same cliches, and we congratulate ourselves for doing so. This enables us to tell ourselves that we are not racists, and to separate ourselves in imagination from the historical disaster of race that our people created and from which we continue to benefit.

In other words, one effect of the civil rights movement was to fuel a massive self-delusion essentially enforced through speech codes. This has made racism more elusive and it has made white people less honest with black people and with ourselves, but it has not solved the concrete problems of race in America.

In fact, since we white folks do not appear to ourselves to be racists, the only explanation we can accept for the racist structure of our society is cultural pathology in black people. Our self-delusion, in other words, actually fuels our racism.

There is a notion, traditional especially in feminism, that "words are important; they create attitudes." Fine. But obviously words can also disguise or obscure attitudes: for short we could call this function of language "ideology." Feminists and others might want to ask themselves why they're out here insisting that the realities of their own oppression be concealed.

Every liberation movement of modern America, from civil rights to feminism to gay pride, has had control of speech on its agenda. And in every case that element of its program has been directly and obviously counter-productive. It's simply a way of insisting that we straight white guys conceal what we're thinking, and rewarding us for presenting ourselves falsely. To the extent to which such an approach is successful, it just makes it impossible for you to tell who your enemies are. At the most extreme reach of its hallucination, it makes it impossible for us to tell that we are your enemies and oppressors: we're all benevolent egalitarians, because we don't say "chick" or "fag."

So let Shockey go. He was indeed joking, and he was joking - mildly, actually - in a way many of us joke. Shockey's homophobia - like that of the rest of us - is wrong. But the fact that, unlike the rest of us, he speaks in public the way he speaks in private, is admirable.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book, published by the State University of New York Press, is "End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History."