Today's Globe op-ed page was more interesting than usual.  There was an incendiary piece by James Carroll about Bush's upcoming SOTU address, that seemed to borrow a bit from Gogol's famous troika.  Some insights into the "Universal Health Insurance" scam (and a little Obama-love) from Robert Kuttner.  And an interesting, somewhat inflammatory piece employing an unnecessary and terribly misguided metaphor, about another inflammatory piece about a shockingly inflammatory statement made by a sports commentator a couple of weeks ago about the lovely and talented Tiger Woods.

This last piece, by sports writer Timothy M. Gay, is misguided, I think, on a number of points. First and foremost in his careless use of precise and very charged terms. Conflating the separate evils of apartheid, slavery, and genocide does nothing to advance understanding of any of them. The evils of slavery in the American South and its aftermath were many and vile, but genocide was simply not among them.  Even to comment on this risks more and more insulting and reductive arguments.

To give you an example of the can of worms Gay opens up, he writes (of his Holocaust/Jim Crow "analogy"):

Too harsh an analogy? Well, consider this: in all its depravity, the Third Reich lasted little more than a decade. America's subjugation of black people lasted many times longer. Indeed, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of freed slaves still lived in fear of being lynched if they failed to observe a code of racial etiquette that forced them to bow and scrape at every turn. During the despicable reign of Jim Crow, most blacks were not only denied their inalienable rights but prevented from receiving a meaningful education or earning a decent living.

Later, Gay states:

We'll never know how many black lives perished in racial violence. A University of Illinois study suggests that, between 1882 and 1930, white mobs murdered a black man, woman or child somewhere in America nearly once a week, every week.

Why did Gay feel the need to compare two incomparable crimes here?  In doing so, he trivializes both.  It takes only a moment for anyone to point out that while the Holocaust "lasted little more than a decade" the best estimates have an inconceivable 11 million human beings, over half of them Jews, very systematically murdered, factory-style, in that span of time.  Would it have been more evil had it taken twenty-five years?  Would it have been less evil had it occurred over the space of six months?   The Nazis were often able to wipe out whole populations of Jews from cities all over Europe in days.  Budapest's once-thriving Jewish community of half a million, one of the largest in Europe, was annihilated in seven weeks.  

In no way, not in magnitude or kind, is this comparable to generations of slavery or the terrorist campaign against blacks in the south between 1882 and 1930 that followed its abolition. Not because one is a greater crime than the other.  The Final Solution and American Slavery are both absolute and singular evils.  There is nothing to be gained by comparing them.  And it is not a matter, as Gay strongly implies, of devaluing one crime against humanity by recognizing the enormity of another.  The insinuation borders on obscene, and my bet is that you'll see some letters to the editor in the coming days pointing out the undercurrent of antisemitism in his argument.

I understand his point, however ham-handedly made, is that "education" has made the Holocaust taboo as a light-hearted metaphor for doing away with your enemies, and that lack of education about "America's forgotten genocide" (and he's not talking about the systematic extermination of Native Americans here, which he never mentions) would keep people from making light of the heinous crimes of lynching in our own backyards.

But again, not quite.  Americans' experience of race and racism, of guilt and responsibility for aspects of its collective history, is enormously complex.  I don't think for one moment that the individual who made the vile comment or the one who OK'd the magazine cover (a separate issue, the reaction to which was far more troubling than the cover itself) that prompted Gay to write his op-ed piece, are ignorant of America's history of slavery, Jim Crow, or the terrorist campaign of the KKK.  It's not lack of information or education that's the culprit here.  It's almost poignant to argue that it is.

There's a psychological component that seems to go over Gay's head.  It's not so much the facts of this history but a "safe" way to discuss it publicly that's missing today.  Gay's attempt to base his argument on what he calls an "analogy" that pits one mass crime against another in popular consciousness only highlights the problem. 

There's a sense that the only proper way to discuss slavery and Jim Crow is in the context of what seems to many to be personal responsibility and recrimination.  It's not a reciprocal conversation, and can't be, because, while for African-Americans (not all African-Americans, Barack Obama being only one very notable exception) there is a clear continuum from American slavery, through Jim Crow and segregation, to today, no such continuum exists for many Americans of other backgrounds and origins in their personal experience of history.  So it is that the "experience" of slavery is concentrated while "responsibility" for it is dispersed.

It is vexing for many Americans who have no intimate knowledge of personal connection to an oppressive regime to feel personally implicated in its crimes.  But while many agonize over it nonetheless, many more simply shy away from speaking about it.  Not because they don't know about it, and not because they don't care about it, but largely because, as I've said, they feel they have no "safe" way of speaking about it, one that does not automatically implicate them in a cycle of personal responsibility and recrimination.

This is why, I think in part at least, speaking of race has become a kind of taboo in America today, unless the topic is broached by credible victims of racism, who can then speak of it, largely among themselves, without regard to decorum.  "Members of the dominant majority" who bring it up, on the other hand, however sensitively, are constantly aware of their presumption in doing so, and often feel they risk being labeled racist for it.  Those who claim to be "color blind" are laughed at or chided.  It's a double bind. 

On one level, taboos beg to be spoken.  They are in the collective unconscious, the negative image of acceptable thought, and some people with special sensitivities have a not inconceivable, irresistible urge to say what is forbidden.  Some may have a stronger attraction, for any number of reasons, to one rather than another taboo.  We recognize the inevitability of transgressive behavior in adolescence, but expect adults to have mastered their mental urges. Some sports commentators seem not to have gotten the memo.

My take on the incident in question, where the offensive statement was so outrageously beyond the pale, so clearly unacceptable (and was immediately and universally condemned) is that it was not a problem of lack of education, but one of irresistible transgression.  The offending commentator did not use a Holocaust analogy not because making light of the Holocaust had been "educated out of him," but because, aside from being a nonsensical slur in this context, the Holocaust is not the taboo du jour.  Right now, race is the thing we all want to speak of, but mustn't speak of. 

With the kind of cognitive dissonance that prevails in our public discourse on race, it's actually a wonder that people don't blurt out offensive epithets more often.  It is a function of having no honest and intelligent way to engage on uncomfortable issues.  It's communication — a common language of mutual respect that acknowledges complexity and difference and enables "safe," open public dialogue about race — that's missing, not "education," as such.  It's not so much the intellectual component, but the psychological one that needs work.