malicious intent

An interesting post from Malcolm Gladwell on racism. Given his penchant for using headlines as an opportunity to channel and reveal the zeitgeist, he draws on the recent Kramer and Mad Max tirades to tease out how to consider hate speech (and surprises me with his judgment of Richards’ rant as I hadn’t looked deeply into the story behind the hysteria). He offers three criteria for judging a statement as to its degree of acceptability: content, intention, and conviction.

While I think his criteria are effective and descriptions of ‘content’ and ‘conviction’ are spot-on, his description of ‘intention’ sticks in my craw:

Was the remark intended to wound, or intended to perpetuate some social wrong? Was it malicious? I remember sitting in church, as a child, while our Presbyterian minister made jokes about how "cheap" Presbyterians were. If non-Presbyterians make that joke, it might be offensive. But a Presbyterian making jokes about Presbyterians with the intention of making Presbyterians laugh is fine, because there is a complete absence of malice in the comment. I think that Richard Pryor or Dave Chapelle's use of the word "nigger," or the Jewish jokes told by Jewish comics fall into the same category.

The leap from ‘was it malicious?’ to ‘all of us Presbyterians are cheap’* doesn’t follow because it implies that people can’t say malicious things to those within their own group, and at face value it excludes the possibility that a Catholic may be telling a cheap Presbyterian joke to a bunch of friendly Presbyterians. I know Gladwell didn’t miss this point, but his words did (with the exception of ‘might be offensive’), and that gap is most important because it’s right in there where all of our inter-racial relations are defined: are you who’s running your mouth friend or foe, and do you realize that you’re being treated with generosity? That’s why the room either goes dead cold or busts out in gales of laughter depending on who is using the n word and why understanding that fine line of whether you’re allowed to speak that way or not indicates a tremendous sensitivity to those around you and their perception of you, completely independent of whether you’re ‘part of the group,’ and this is where this whole issue gets fascinating.** It’s the gooey analog center of understanding race and our relations with each other in a world that prefers the can-can’t of digital explanations. There are a lot of cues as to whether the guy with the black leather jacket and shaved head telling the Jewish joke is doing it with malice or not, and we can’t assume malice based only on general social exclusion. To revise Gladwell, anyone making jokes about someone with the intention of making them laugh is fine only if there is a complete absence of malice in the comment. It’s hard because it’s up to each of us to perceive maliciousness or its lack, and using only the cue of 'is he like me' doesn't cut it.

* Why is it always cheap? Is there a group of people that hasn't been stereotyped at one time or another as cheap? 'Joke: What did the Scot, Jew, and Presbyterian say when they walked into the bar? Punchline: Who's buying?'

** I’d bet this is part of why Richard Pryor was allowed to make fun of white people long before Carlos Mencia*** (or an earlier groundbreaking non-black comedian that isn’t springing to mind) was allowed to make fun of blacks; a desire on the part of many whites to include blacks into the group—a desire maybe not conveyed on the macro level by blacks toward whites until later, if indeed it has yet. Mencia also goes to great lengths to make fun of himself in addition to his race and maybe this too is why he’s allowed to say the things he does about others.

*** And this is also why Mencia is funny, but so many of his fans, when recounting his shpiel the next day, are anything but.