"Tigergate" Isn't A Black Thing
John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a regular contributor to The New Republic.
For all of the aching desire a certain crowd have had in 2009 to show that America post-Obama isn't "post-racial" - and golly, I wonder if anybody really ever thought we were - the Tiger Woods business of late is a ringing indication that we're well on our way to it.
To wit, what we have seen lately is a golfer who has turned out to be a philanderer. What we are not seeing is a Black Athlete who has turned out to be a philanderer. There isn't anything meaningfully "black" about Woods' "transgressions," nor is there anything about what he has done that corresponds to any racial "narratives" that the usual dutiful suspects are typically trotted out to "remind" us of on a regular basis.
That is, Woods long ago declared himself to be "Cablinasian" to Oprah, and America has bought it. And it is of a piece with so much else: it's the America whose youth have embraced hiphop as mainstream music. It's the America who thrill to a 24 on television with not one but two black Presidents, and then elected a real one. It's the America who watched a thread on the hit sitcom The Office in which black Idris Elba manages the place for a while and is hit on by two of the cubicle-denizen women (including an extremely white one) and no one bats an eye - note that this would have been an eyebrow-raiser ten years ago and impossible five years before that. This is the America that sees Tiger Woods as just a person, evaluating him on - sorry - The Content of His Character.
Yes, Jena, Louisiana. Yes, people feeling that they will be more likely to get a job if they leave out the more identifiably "black" components of their names. Yes, whatever else.
But if we accept that change happens in steps - and I assume we all do - then an America in which a brown-skinned celebrity athlete is processed as just a person is big, big news. We have a Long Way To Go? When do we admit that we have at least passed the halfway point?
Tiger Woods, in designating himself truly a mutt rather than Black By Default, is ahead of the curve. There are those who think he was supposed to declare himself "black" because of how, say, police might see him. But to do that would be to deny that his Thai mother contributed half of his genes and raised him - raised him, unable, as someone not Black American, to do so as a Black Mother. So, Tiger was brave enough to - brace yourself, Soul Patrol - be what he is. Two things. Not just black - and not even mainly black.
Something we can all agree on - in fifty years a lot of people will see it as odd that in our times that was seen as news. We're mixing, a lot. There are now increasing numbers of self-avowedly "biracial" people - the days I knew as a kid when the black-white "mixed" kid was faced with having to "admit" that she was "black" when she was about thirteen, crying at forums where such issues were discussed out of ambivalence over disowning her non-black parent, are past. Tiger isn't, from what is evident publicly, especially deep - but he's prescient. He is the future, just as FDR, hardly deep himself, gave us Social Security, the FDIC and so much more. Sometimes we need to hearken to people who are not given to thinking too very much.
It's interesting watching how people stuck in the old, shall we say, narrative don't quite know what to do with this. David Swerdlick at The Root makes the old assumption that in refusing to identify as black, Tiger must look down on blackness. "Tiger's pre-post-racial vibe backfired because he apparently thought that it made him special. It turns out he's just like everyone else."
But wait - why the assumption that Tiger thought "Cablinasian" was "special"? More specifically, "specialer" than being black? Note the "apparently" - no one knows Tiger thought that. And it's because it's a chancy, not to mention abusive, assumption. Can't it be that Tiger thinks he's Cablinasian because, well, the woman who raised him is Thai? His mother? The woman who raised him, whose physical traits are evident in his face???
The idea that anyone who steps outside of identity as "black" must not like black people is, quite simply, a sign of the lingering stain of insecurity in the race. Think about it - a brown-skinned guy with a Thai mother says he can't say he's just black and he must not like black people? That's extremely 1990. And thankfully, increasingly antique in 2009.
Time to trot out the Blacks in Wax. Here's James Weldon Johnson, erstwhile NAACP head, on how to deal with bigotry - i.e. to translate into our modern terms, how the police feel about you:
I will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life. I will not let prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat. My inner life is mine, and I will defend and maintain its integrity against the forces of hell.
The elaborate language shows you that Johnson lived in times of open, virulent racism. And so - Tiger Woods today is supposed to identify as a brotha because, despite his Thai mother and Swedish wife and opulent modern American life, he might -- just possibly but not really -- get pulled over?
Are we to base a racial identity on negative impressions others have of us? Please. There is nothing meaningfully progressive in such a notion, unless by progress we mean eternally making white people uncomfortable.
Feel "black" in 2009 as a response to how white people feel about you and you are giving in to a racism which, while ever present, is ever receding. You, with a black man in the White House, are letting racism win. Which is not strength - except in pungency of rhetoric, which is about .00001 percent of what makes a human life meaningful.
Then Jenee Desmond-Harris at The Root is taken by how she, taking in Tiger's adventures of late, does not feel embarrassed that he is "one of us" making the race look bad - in a piece carrying an implication that this is somehow due to a flaw in Woods. The gist is something like "Okay, you said you're Cablinasian, and I'm so appalled that I disown you and studiously pretend that you really aren't 'black'. So there, Tiger Woods."
She doesn't realize that this is the way she's supposed to feel. He's just a person. It's what he said he is, it's what he wants to be, and it's what he is. And it's what we used to say we wanted to be. Interesting - I can imagine a black stand-up routine where somebody said "These wives standing by their men admitting they fooled around - if Tiger's wife was black you know she'd be all over his ass!!! (Ha ha ha ...)." Well, it seems hardly unlikely that Tiger's skinny blond lady came after him with a golf club.
Call it a "black" experience - or evidence that people are people and Tiger has been leading nothing but a human life. Isn't that what we wanted?
Or - I'm trying to wrap my head around the sentiment here - is it that she is disgusted that Tiger doesn't understand that white people are seeing him as a nigger? Yes, I am exploiting my own color here in writing that word - but I mean it and it's necessary here. Is it that Tiger is too callow, with his Swedish hottie wife and such, to understand that white America sees him as a nigger?
According to this "narrative," for example, the media are so interested in Tiger's extramarital sex life because all of his mistresses have been white. Supposedly if he had been sleeping with black women America wouldn't care - this is a major thread in the blogs, such as here. But is this true? Let's say the photos of the Tiger bimbos were of shapely brown-skinned babes - can we really say that the tabloids would suddenly lose interest and go home? Wouldn't this be even better news - i.e. "Looks like Tiger got tired of his skinny white trophy wife and needed some chocolate?" Think about it - "Looks like Cablinasian Tiger's really black after all and he needed himself some flava?"
The real news here is that Tiger Woods, a brown-skinned man as "black" definitionally as our President, has been catting around with white women and America just receives it as a star athlete misbehaving. Oh, I know - surf around on the web and surely you'll find some racist catcalls from lonely, anonymous individuals. "Out there" - the types who couldn't keep a black President from the White House. But what is the national take on this?
He's just some guy. He declared himself "Cablinasian" and married someone of the whitest possible extraction. They have kids, who are even less "black" than he is - expect the plangent autobiography from one of them in about 2025 about what it's like to be the one-quarter-black progeny of a father who dissociated himself from cultural blackness back in the Gay Nineties, which will, by then, be pulled from the book-download sites about three months after posting due to lack of interest.
And here in the present, it turns out that "some guy" fools around, like countless people of his status. The women he did so with were white - and in contrast to the interracial facet that helped keep the O.J. business percolating not so long ago, nobody really cares. He's just a person. Those who studiously disallow him that status -- rather than making peace with the obvious reality and moving on -- are contravening what the entire liberal tradition has been about in this nation. The pursuit of happiness is antithetical to hunkering behind the barricades of wary, defensive ethnic separatism when the times no longer require it. Pretending that they do denies what the Civil Rights heroes of yore devoted their lives to giving us all.
The Civil Rights revolution was about allowing people to not only become President, but to f*** up "post-racially." Let's - as progressives in the true sense - go with it.
By John McWhorter:
Reprinted with permission from
The New Republic For all of the aching desire a certain crowd have had in 2009 to show that America post-Obama isn't "post-racial" - and golly, I wonder if anybody really ever thought we were - the Tiger Woods business of late is a ringing indication that we're well on our way to it.
To wit, what we have seen lately is a golfer who has turned out to be a philanderer. What we are not seeing is a Black Athlete who has turned out to be a philanderer. There isn't anything meaningfully "black" about Woods' "transgressions," nor is there anything about what he has done that corresponds to any racial "narratives" that the usual dutiful suspects are typically trotted out to "remind" us of on a regular basis.
That is, Woods long ago declared himself to be "Cablinasian" to Oprah, and America has bought it. And it is of a piece with so much else: it's the America whose youth have embraced hiphop as mainstream music. It's the America who thrill to a 24 on television with not one but two black Presidents, and then elected a real one. It's the America who watched a thread on the hit sitcom The Office in which black Idris Elba manages the place for a while and is hit on by two of the cubicle-denizen women (including an extremely white one) and no one bats an eye - note that this would have been an eyebrow-raiser ten years ago and impossible five years before that. This is the America that sees Tiger Woods as just a person, evaluating him on - sorry - The Content of His Character.
Yes, Jena, Louisiana. Yes, people feeling that they will be more likely to get a job if they leave out the more identifiably "black" components of their names. Yes, whatever else.
But if we accept that change happens in steps - and I assume we all do - then an America in which a brown-skinned celebrity athlete is processed as just a person is big, big news. We have a Long Way To Go? When do we admit that we have at least passed the halfway point?
Tiger Woods, in designating himself truly a mutt rather than Black By Default, is ahead of the curve. There are those who think he was supposed to declare himself "black" because of how, say, police might see him. But to do that would be to deny that his Thai mother contributed half of his genes and raised him - raised him, unable, as someone not Black American, to do so as a Black Mother. So, Tiger was brave enough to - brace yourself, Soul Patrol - be what he is. Two things. Not just black - and not even mainly black.
Something we can all agree on - in fifty years a lot of people will see it as odd that in our times that was seen as news. We're mixing, a lot. There are now increasing numbers of self-avowedly "biracial" people - the days I knew as a kid when the black-white "mixed" kid was faced with having to "admit" that she was "black" when she was about thirteen, crying at forums where such issues were discussed out of ambivalence over disowning her non-black parent, are past. Tiger isn't, from what is evident publicly, especially deep - but he's prescient. He is the future, just as FDR, hardly deep himself, gave us Social Security, the FDIC and so much more. Sometimes we need to hearken to people who are not given to thinking too very much.
It's interesting watching how people stuck in the old, shall we say, narrative don't quite know what to do with this. David Swerdlick at The Root makes the old assumption that in refusing to identify as black, Tiger must look down on blackness. "Tiger's pre-post-racial vibe backfired because he apparently thought that it made him special. It turns out he's just like everyone else."
But wait - why the assumption that Tiger thought "Cablinasian" was "special"? More specifically, "specialer" than being black? Note the "apparently" - no one knows Tiger thought that. And it's because it's a chancy, not to mention abusive, assumption. Can't it be that Tiger thinks he's Cablinasian because, well, the woman who raised him is Thai? His mother? The woman who raised him, whose physical traits are evident in his face???
The idea that anyone who steps outside of identity as "black" must not like black people is, quite simply, a sign of the lingering stain of insecurity in the race. Think about it - a brown-skinned guy with a Thai mother says he can't say he's just black and he must not like black people? That's extremely 1990. And thankfully, increasingly antique in 2009.
Time to trot out the Blacks in Wax. Here's James Weldon Johnson, erstwhile NAACP head, on how to deal with bigotry - i.e. to translate into our modern terms, how the police feel about you:
I will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life. I will not let prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat. My inner life is mine, and I will defend and maintain its integrity against the forces of hell.
The elaborate language shows you that Johnson lived in times of open, virulent racism. And so - Tiger Woods today is supposed to identify as a brotha because, despite his Thai mother and Swedish wife and opulent modern American life, he might -- just possibly but not really -- get pulled over?
Are we to base a racial identity on negative impressions others have of us? Please. There is nothing meaningfully progressive in such a notion, unless by progress we mean eternally making white people uncomfortable.
Feel "black" in 2009 as a response to how white people feel about you and you are giving in to a racism which, while ever present, is ever receding. You, with a black man in the White House, are letting racism win. Which is not strength - except in pungency of rhetoric, which is about .00001 percent of what makes a human life meaningful.
Then Jenee Desmond-Harris at The Root is taken by how she, taking in Tiger's adventures of late, does not feel embarrassed that he is "one of us" making the race look bad - in a piece carrying an implication that this is somehow due to a flaw in Woods. The gist is something like "Okay, you said you're Cablinasian, and I'm so appalled that I disown you and studiously pretend that you really aren't 'black'. So there, Tiger Woods."
She doesn't realize that this is the way she's supposed to feel. He's just a person. It's what he said he is, it's what he wants to be, and it's what he is. And it's what we used to say we wanted to be. Interesting - I can imagine a black stand-up routine where somebody said "These wives standing by their men admitting they fooled around - if Tiger's wife was black you know she'd be all over his ass!!! (Ha ha ha ...)." Well, it seems hardly unlikely that Tiger's skinny blond lady came after him with a golf club.
Call it a "black" experience - or evidence that people are people and Tiger has been leading nothing but a human life. Isn't that what we wanted?
Or - I'm trying to wrap my head around the sentiment here - is it that she is disgusted that Tiger doesn't understand that white people are seeing him as a nigger? Yes, I am exploiting my own color here in writing that word - but I mean it and it's necessary here. Is it that Tiger is too callow, with his Swedish hottie wife and such, to understand that white America sees him as a nigger?
According to this "narrative," for example, the media are so interested in Tiger's extramarital sex life because all of his mistresses have been white. Supposedly if he had been sleeping with black women America wouldn't care - this is a major thread in the blogs, such as here. But is this true? Let's say the photos of the Tiger bimbos were of shapely brown-skinned babes - can we really say that the tabloids would suddenly lose interest and go home? Wouldn't this be even better news - i.e. "Looks like Tiger got tired of his skinny white trophy wife and needed some chocolate?" Think about it - "Looks like Cablinasian Tiger's really black after all and he needed himself some flava?"
The real news here is that Tiger Woods, a brown-skinned man as "black" definitionally as our President, has been catting around with white women and America just receives it as a star athlete misbehaving. Oh, I know - surf around on the web and surely you'll find some racist catcalls from lonely, anonymous individuals. "Out there" - the types who couldn't keep a black President from the White House. But what is the national take on this?
He's just some guy. He declared himself "Cablinasian" and married someone of the whitest possible extraction. They have kids, who are even less "black" than he is - expect the plangent autobiography from one of them in about 2025 about what it's like to be the one-quarter-black progeny of a father who dissociated himself from cultural blackness back in the Gay Nineties, which will, by then, be pulled from the book-download sites about three months after posting due to lack of interest.
And here in the present, it turns out that "some guy" fools around, like countless people of his status. The women he did so with were white - and in contrast to the interracial facet that helped keep the O.J. business percolating not so long ago, nobody really cares. He's just a person. Those who studiously disallow him that status -- rather than making peace with the obvious reality and moving on -- are contravening what the entire liberal tradition has been about in this nation. The pursuit of happiness is antithetical to hunkering behind the barricades of wary, defensive ethnic separatism when the times no longer require it. Pretending that they do denies what the Civil Rights heroes of yore devoted their lives to giving us all.
The Civil Rights revolution was about allowing people to not only become President, but to f*** up "post-racially." Let's - as progressives in the true sense - go with it.
By John McWhorter:
Reprinted with permission from
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There is another angle to the Woods story that needs to be written and talked about and it is the decline in America media and journalism. Mr. McWhorter's article shows how ideological journal ism is mudding the public waters of discourse. This form of journalism pollutes the public dialog and feeds off are nations trouble racial history and its contemporary counterpart. Men and women like Mr. McWhorter see race everywhere. They are prone to talk about it even when it has absolutely nothing to do with the situation at hand.
Now a reasonable person says ?What exactly does Mr. Woods? infidelity have to do with his race, his wife?s race, his mistress?s race or his parent?s race?? But some people are so despite to negate the influence of race in America that they use any situation to espouse their theory. See their ?post-racial? America is like pornography ? you know it when you see it. But there is a problem with this approach one man?s pornography is another?s art.
> Red
Can you please explain WHY red is your favorite color?
> Umm... I don't know. Ever since I was little, I JUST LIKED RED. There is really no explanation. I like blue too, but RED is my favorite color.
>I can't explain WHY I like pistachio ice-cream either. That's just my personal preference.
The author suffers from the same brainwashing as you, the difference being that his is unintentional, whereas yours is not.
To know that fire is hot is not prejudice against fire, it is knowing the nature of fire.
To know that "White" America has a negative regard and intent for its "Black" citizens is not racism, it is knowing the nature of "White" America, based on history, as well as current events.
I would posit that "Black" America, subjected every minute to the ravages of racism in America, are wise to be skeptical of the intentions of "Whites" towards them, as long as people like yourself are numbered among them.
What reason do "Whites" have for theirs? When have "Black" people subjugated them, and used the law, the economics, the media, and the police forces, in an effort to continue any subjugation of "Whites"?
It is clear in fact, that you have reading comprehension problems, the "1/4" or even your assertion "less" is evidence that you both suffer from the brainwashing that makes you think it has any significance at all.
At least he was trying to suggest that it should make no difference.
Btw, there is no such thing as a "Black" racist, we deal with reality, while you neo hatemongers deal in hysterical agitprop, and mathematics of delusion.
Do taxi drivers stop for "Black" people now?
__________________________
When I want a NYC cabdriver to stop, I stand next to a white person.
What's really a rip is most of the NYC cab drivers are racist Hindus and arrogant Africans who abhor "Black" successful attractive people like me.
For decades, if not for the history of the US, any contact by those Africans, and Hindus, has been almost exclusively with with "White people, who made sure that those people only knew of us as thugs and criminals.
This is one of my goals for my international business, to show the world a different picture. But I have to do it by my own bootstraps, because there is no way venture capitalists will invest in "Black" enterprises to go international.
Look at the music being circulated worldwide, do you see postitve examples of "Black" music st its finest, such as Patti Labelle, Linda Hopkins, Al Jarreau, and others? No you only see the gangsta rappers, taken from the hardest areas of the city. Do you not see the big picture?
I am glad for the inner city youths who make it out, but a very negative picture of "us" as a whole is being broadcast by those who do not have our progress as an interest.
BET? owned by Viacom. Not broadcast outside the US, even though bootleg DVDs are very popular. Think about it.
I have met so many dark-skinned people who themselves use the n-word, because they learned it from the "White" American businessmen who infect their areas, and are genuinely suprised when I explain the etymology and history of the word. We are not the only ones referred to in this manner by "Whites".
I cannot tell you the precise number of women who told me they thought thought that the term "jungle bunny" was a term of affection given them by their "White" American boyfriends.
When Richard Pryor made his joke about how Asians were being taught how to say the n-word, I think not even he knew how accurate that scenario actually is.
These people were even more severely affected by the brainwashing of the US media, because they were not exposed to the negative underbelly of what most "Black" Americans knew for generations.
When they get to America, they instinctively act on that which they have been taught. It is not entirely their fault, even after learning the truth, the brainwash is very hard to undo.
And truth be further told, Colin Powell ("I ain't all that Black"), and even President Obama, are basically first generation "Black" Americans, which explains their futile and not-at-all-beneficial efforts to distance themselves from being stereotyped as "Black".
They are still our brothers, but every family has some dysfunction.
Help defeat this attitude by making friends, and associates, invite them to "our" environs, and show them we are not as portrayed. Their discrimination is not from hate, guilt, or instinctive animosity, it is from their brainwashing.
Teach them differently.
Tiger's Thing for White Girls.
by Elizabeth Gates
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-08/tigers-sexual-preference/
I will attempt, in this limited space, to explain some of the reasons you are quite incorrect in your conclusions.
Mr. Woods used the term "Cablanasian" to refer to himself, which is a play of word that shows that he, at least, understands the sheer idiocy of the concept of "race".
The concept of "race" itself was created as, and is used as a tool to justify discrimination of all sorts, from territorial conquest to slavery, to Jim-Crow corruption, to genocide. In reality, there is no such thing biologically as "race".
The fact that you, the rest of the media, and most others still see him as a "Black" person, in your own words "as Black as the president", shows that you have not, despite your obvious abundance of education, been able to un-brainwash yourself from the concept.
Because so many are not able to free our minds, our arses have thus nothing to follow, so the media crucifixion of Mr. Woods will always take hold, be more effective, and ultimately be more devastating to the career of someone perceived as "Black" simply becuse of the above-mentioned brainwashing.
Those who still live in intolerance of "those people" will happily swallow warm from the tap, any ooze that they can use as reason to despise, one doesn't even have to surf away from these pages to find a preponderance of such people.
Post racial America? I laugh at the concept, it suggests that because a man perceived as "Black" has become president, that there is no more racism in America.
Do taxi drivers stop for "Black" people now? Do not insurance companies and banks still consider ethnicity in determining insurance and mortgage rates, even though such is supposed to be illegal? Have the cops learned to deal with us in the same manner as they do "Whites?"
Was Bush's weak and late response to hurricane Katrina weak and late because of any factor other than the perceived "race" of the majority of the victims? Was Barbara Bush's joking while touring the damage predicated on anything else?
Don Imus can call an accomplished group of elite athletes and students "nappy-headed hos", and the social sanction lasted for what, some two or three months? Yet Reverend Wright, because he calls to task the continuance of racism as exemplified by Imus, is demonized by a press, the effects of which will probably follow him to his last breath, and beyond.
Reverend Jackson's reference to "Hymietown" is used to this day to demonize him, even by people who themselves are even more polluted with hatred towards Jews.
I am a "Black" man.
Not by choice, or even by birth, but simply because the term "Black" replaces the previous epithet of exclusion with a less insulting one, coined and used by people who can never accept me as a fellow human being and citizen, deserving of all of the civil rights of the country of my birth and citizenship.
I use the term "Black" because it is sometimes necessary to discuss it when matters of intolerance should be discussed, when someone looks at my melanin content, and decides that even though they know nothing of my character, I must fit a stereotype in their unenlightened minds.
This is why it is indeed a "Black" thing, every one in the media knows full well that the repeated harping of speculation, and calling irrelevant and private matters to light will be damaging to this "Cablanasian's", career, they also know full well that "race" will be a major factor in the public response to their harping, yet they gladly continue the crucifixion.
It is indeed part of the "old narrative". The narrative may be old, but you are sadly mistaken if you think that it is confined to the past.
Have "Blacks" learned to deal with the cops in the same manner as do "Whites?" No, until they do, please stop the irrational complaints. Thanks.
Why is it that, in my own car, when stopped by a cop, because my left rear light was blinking erratically, I have to be confronted with one cop pointing a gun at me?
If you drive, has this ever happened to you?
Once, while changing a flat tire, I was made to stop, put my hands behind my head, while the cop ran my license plate, again with a gun pointed to my head.
Has this ever happened to you?
Once my jazz band was arrested because some neighbor called and reported that we were involved in "devil worship". Even though we were released, the arrest and transport to police HQ was totally unnecessary, and a violation of our rights, even if we had been "devil worshipers" as the neighbor lied, what right do the police have to arrest us?
Has this ever happened to you.
Until you can answer yes, then you have no idea of what you spew, so take it to te kkk pages, where you will be welcomed.
People need to stop living through these "super stars" and start worring about them selves. The only reason I looked at this story (I read the first couple of lines only) was because I am so sick of the race card being played I wanted to see what this reporter (and I use that term lightly) was going to say but it's just more dribble!
Tiger is a man, many men have fallen because of their affairs with women, why is he any diffrent, because he swings a club? So did cave men, think they ever had multiple partners? I do!!