Hi, folks. I wasn't planning to write anything this week, but I've been reading about that Tucker Carlson text message and I don't agree with the conventional wisdom that's developed very quickly around it.
In the message, Carlson describes a video in which "a group of Trump guys" fight "an Antifa kid ... three against one, at least." Carlson calls this "dishonorable.... It's not how white men fight." We're told that this message "set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox" and was a significant factor in his firing.
Much of the liberal media finds this implausible. His bosses knew he was racist! He says racist things on the air all the time! How is this different?
But it is different, although not for any logical reason. It has to do with our cultural response to different forms of racism.
In our culture, it's considered more or less acceptable to utter a group slander about people of color. At worst, it's seen as only slightly over the line. If you say that those urban thugs in Chicago sure like to kill one another, or yeah, that guy murdered all those people in Texas, but what do you expect -- he's an illegal who was kicked out the country multiple times, hardly anyone will bat an eyelash. This is how right-wingers (and some "politically incorrect" moderates and self-styled liberals) talk all the time.
So you can get away with suggesting that people of color are inferior. But saying that white people are superior? That's gauche. That's something that's said by neo-Nazis and Klansmen -- people who are beyond the pale. Even Donald Trump, the most racist president in living memory, doesn't say anything like that outright.
There's no effective difference between categorically denigrating people of color and saying white people are better than people of color. But in our culture, Decent People recoil from the latter and largely shrug off the former. Saying white people are better than non-whites reminds us too much of people our national mythology tells us we bravely defeated -- the Nazis, Southern segregationists.
So yes, I think this text might have horrified Fox management in a way that Carlson's many other racist pronouncements didn't. Maybe the leadership at Fox understood that this was no more racist than his usual pronouncements, but they knew it would land differently.
And now goodbye again. I'll be back on Monday.
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