Beyond Michael Richards
Greetings from the San Francisco Bay
Area, where I’ve been watching the Michael Richards controversy
with great interest. Media—particularly new media--has played a
central role in the development of this story. First off, if
Richards, the former “Seinfeld” actor, hadn't been
surreptitiously caught on video tape, his racist tirade would likely
have been a non-story. After the captured video was posted on an
easily accessible website, the controversy really heated up, and it's
easy to see why: Richards hateful invective was unsanitized,
unfiltered and presented without editorial interpretation. In a news
climate of highly-controlled spin and tight sound bytes, it was both
an outrageously painful and refreshingly raw bit of footage to
witness.
Analysis certainly has its place, and
there has been no shortage of it where the Richards story is
concerned. Numerous blogs and comment sites have opened a window into
how average folks view the incident. I offered my own bit of punditry
on the topic in a short op-ed written for the Progressive Media
Project and distributed by McClatchy-Tribune. I argued that we need
to look beyond the tirade of one celebrity to the underlying feelings
of prejudice within each of us. Unfortunately, most of the media
analysis of the Richards affair has focused almost exclusively on the
man, and much less on the culture that creates that level of
intolerance.
In recent days, some leaders within the
African American community—including the NAACP, Rev. Jesse Jackson,
and Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles)--have called for a
boycott of the N-word, which Richards used like a twisted mantra
during his rant. As Waters said during a recent press conference,
“don't use the N-word, no matter who you are, whether you're black,
white, young or old.”
There's a wonderful recorded debate
about the N-word between University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael
Eric Dyson and Princeton's Dr. Cornel West's on West's famous hip hop
album “Sketches of My Culture.” Their debate articulates many of
my mixed feelings about the N-word and attempts to silence its usage.
I won't get into all of that here, but I will say that I think the
Richards tirade and the issues that have come up in its aftermath
serve as a reminder that journalists should avoid looking for easy
answers to the thorny problems of racism, and must look beyond the
actions of an individual like Michael Richards when it comes to
issues of intolerance.
--Andrea Lewis