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In late October, a fan and season ticket holder for the Orlando Magic, Hooman Hamzehloui, called Houston Rockets player Dikembe Mutombo a "monkey" during the Rockets-Magic game. The NBA responded with swift, important sanctions (including ejecting him from the arena, revoking his season pass, barring him from all NBA games for the season.) Mr. Hamzehloui apologized for his behavior in a letter stating: "I would like to take a moment of your time to offer a complete and unconditional apology for my poor behavior, and in particular, my poor choice of words last Thursday night... I am by no means a racist, and if you only knew me better you would never begin to have those thoughts. What I am guilty of is poor judgment in the use of words while doing what I do to many of the visiting team's players, 'heckle them.'" When interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, he said, he didn't know "using the word 'monkey' was bad."
Since then, many fans, sports writers and commentators have weighed in on this incident. These responses (including Mr. Hamzehloui's apology) tell us more about the state of race and the contours of contemporary racism than it does about anything else. The two types of responses can be summed up as: "What's the big deal, we're past that sort of stuff" or "Oh, this is terrible! Thank goodness he was punished." This see-saw response is commonplace in American culture now.
They are both, unfortunately, gravely inadequate, even more: they serve as an impediment. Either defending him or expressing outrage at him allows us all—on both sides of the fence—to ignore the contemporary reality of racism, particularly the way it circulates through images, ideas and name-calling. This process of scape-goating: "gee, isn't that terrible, how could he say that! Some people (not me, or anyone I know) are really behind the times; I didn't know people still thought that way." Or its flip-side, blandly defending/de-emphasizing the incident: "what's the big deal, it's only words" let's us all off the hook.
When we see this type of incident as an outrageous aberration, (this is the "How could he say that!" response), the transgression becomes a means by which we can bond, especially cross-racially. It somehow proves that "we" are better than this now; that racism is an exception now, this calling Mutombo a "monkey" is part of the past, not the present. By the way, both black and whites have participated in this strange post-civil-rights-of-passage.
Clearly, offensive racial name-calling has been generally (but not entirely) stigmatized in dominant American culture. But, by this measure, we can then disown our national culture of racial hierarchy and power and point at the only racists who seem to remain: those who believe in and openly admit to holding and supporting racist ideas and behaviors. The rarity of open hostility to black people seems to prove that we are no longer primarily a nation that maintains white racial privilege, that continues to adopt and support policies that perpetuate centuries of various forms of racial discrimination against black people. We continue to deny just how much whites are racially privileged because of race alone, and just how much racial hostility against black people remains; this definition of racism keeps these denials intact.
When incidents such as these are blandly defended and neutralized, this is based on the same fiction: the imaginary post-racially discriminatory society. This sort of thing, calling Mutombo a "monkey" is then, "a bone-headed act", one that bears no meaningful connection to the legacy of black people being considered closer to apes, deemed 3/5th human, enslaved because they "scientifically proven" to be were genetically, morally and culturally inferior to whites. Ideas that continue in modified form today among some "respected" scholars and scientists. It is random, it is, in this reading, fully disconnected to racialized domination, violence, etc.. It is just a stupid, random thing to say. Give the guy a break. Scanning the web, I found blacks along with whites and others making this case, too.
Both of these responses represent a powerfully rooted form of evasion and denial about race and racism as a primary defining force that shapes our national consciousness. The outraged response makes sense only if you think the logic and perspective conveyed is somehow an exception in American society. This requires a great deal of denial- not unlike the surprise and shock that followed Katrina. It was as if no one knew that there were so many poor, black people, even as the nation excessively consumes popular "ghetto" young male images of these very folk.
One of the ways that white supremacist thinking has evolved since the civil rights era is to present a deeply invested disingenuousness, an "innocence that amounts to the transgressive refusal to know"* Both responses—shock/outrage and dismissiveness — deploy this kind of transgressive refusal to know—both the heckler and the dominant commentaries in response participate in this would-be innocent, transgressive refusal to know.
Mr. Hamzehloui just pulled "monkey" randomly out of a Magic hat?? He had no idea using the word monkey was "bad"?!! We are supposed to believe this? Of course, trying to prove that this denial is near-impossible would have to involve providing examples of centuries of popular culture, language and custom—much of it still alive and well. And then, after this exhausting ritual of proving and showing, those among us who claim innocence, can say, "oh, I see. I didn't know." And, it keeps repeating itself, next time we start all over again. It keeps alive the much-needed fiction of innocence.
A racist — in this definition — is someone who does not perform the fiction of innocence. It is this distinction that enables a racist culture to flourish under the rhetoric of both racial equality and innocence of intent. In a way, he's right, he is guilty of poor judgment; only out and out racists say these things intentionally these days, and he slipped over the invisible line that separates them (the racists) from us.
The praise heaped on the NBA for their swift punishment keeps this river of denial moving along. Banning the racist, what a good idea. Then they (the racists) are out there and we (the good liberals) are in here enjoying all these black male athletes (who if not for their talent and fame, we'd refuse to live around except in very small numbers, avoid sending our kids to schools with them, and allow the police to randomly harass and excessively punish).
This ritual action and response squanders the opportunity to explore the contemporary life of racism and its new modes of performance. This active refusal to know— the resistance to acknowledging the widespread everyday personal practices and institutional forms of racism — keeps racism alive in all its forms.
Instead of disowning this "heckler" who exposed a major part of our collective unconscious, we should ask ourselves the hard questions: What does this say about our culture? What do we think constitutes a racist, today? How might this refusal to know, help keep racism alive? And since there seem to be so few who willingly take up this identity, how might racism be operating without a name? If racism isn't the proper term for how contemporary racial discrimination continues to manifest itself, what terms should we use to describe it? How can we explain the intense investment in whiteness that continues? What steps can we take to actively develop anti-racism education (instead of race-blind rhetoric on top of institutionalized racism)?
The name-calling itself has its own injury attached to it. Mutombo forgives him, he says, and I don't doubt this is true. I would forgive — in fact — I do forgive him, too. Not, though based on the denials in his apology. I know he feels terribly embarrassed and shamed and feel sorry about that. But the dance of disingenuous innocence in his apology, the refusal to confront the truth, this I cannot forgive, not in this case and not all the times it continues to happen. Not at least until it stops.
*From Patricia Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future
Additional Commentary:
> Music, Social Justice and Market Manipulations
> Deadly Silences
> What It Means to Act Affirmatively
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