COLUMN: Seeing racism without looking

From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99 From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99Here at Penn we know a little something about accusations of racism made in blind rage. The phrase "water buffalo" lingers in the background of much of our racial dialogue. Three weeks ago, in Washington, D.C., mayoral aide David Howard started a firestorm. In a meeting with fellow members of the mayor's constituent services office, Howard observed that the department's budget was paltry. He then said that he would need to be "niggardly" with funds. Within hours, word hit the streets that Howard had called several black staffers a name which sounds in many ways like "niggardly." When one of these staffers phoned Howard and demanded an apology, Howard said that he had "used bad judgement" in using the word "niggardly." Mayor Williams responded to outside pressure and when Howard offered to quit, he took him up on it. What's saddest about this case for me isn't that "niggardly" is a perfectly legitimate word meaning "stingy or miserly." And it isn't that "niggardly" has no connection to any known racial slur, coming from Scandinavian roots several hundred years older than the similar-sounding pejorative. David Howard has been made to apologize for using a word that several people didn't understand. Rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt and rather than running the word through a spell checker, several people made the ignorant assumption that the word they had heard was a word that scared them and was unconscionable. Surely there is enough hate and fear in the world already that it shouldn't be necessary to deputize random SAT words as hateful. Even more fearsome, though, is that Mayor Wilson refused to support his appointee. And it wasn't because he didn't know better. And it wasn't because he was being attacked on all sides. It was because of the opinions of a decided minority, voiced by an opinion piece in The Washington Post, that Mayor Williams isn't "black enough" to run the city. And thus, a piece of Norwegian dialect, which I've never used in casual conversation, has become the talk of the town. It's all too easy to shoot first and use the word in Scrabble later. New York City residents probably knew what "nappy hair" was even before the phrase blew up in their faces this past November. To refresh your memories, a popular young teacher, Ruth Sherman, read her third-grade class a book called Nappy Hair about a young black girl trying to deal with her impossibly tangled, or "nappy," hair. The book made quite an impression on Sherman's students and she made copies and sent them home with some of the children. Sherman is white, while the vast majority of the pupils at her Bushwick school are black and Latino. Almost immediately an uproar began over whether a white woman should be using terms like "nappy" in the first place and whether the book was in fact racist. At a school meeting in late in November, Sherman had to endure racial epithets and slurs until she had little choice but to transfer to another school district. Nappy Hair, by Carolivia Harron, has been widely hailed as an important learning text, which ends with the validation that nappy hair can be just as unique and vital as any other style. The parents who only saw a poorly Xeroxed version of the text, and who may not have fully understood its literary attempt, made it impossible for a bright mind to work her magic in a school system which desperately needs the educational potential Ruth Sherman offered. And yet, while the parents were horribly wrong in their actions, there is little doubt that they initial intentions were benign-- the urge to shelter their children from what they saw as a racist threat. I have to wonder why relations are so strained that anger and ignorance is an initial response so much more automatic than assuming people are good at heart and don't really mean to say a random, racist things. The results of these recent cases is sobering. Ruth Sherman transferred to a school in Brooklyn and hasn't been in the news since. In Washington, there is nothing. David Howard doesn't have a job. Mayor Williams has created a racial split far greater than the one he thought he was fixing, and even NAACP head Julian Bond has mocked him. With his credibility at a ridiculous low, he has offered Howard a new job in his office. But as a result of the hoopla, nothing has been learned. The fear of racism triggered by the words "niggardly" and "nappy" still remains. And that is a tragic fact that goes far beyond two people losing their jobs.