Friday's Guest: "A Moratorium on the Charge of 'Racism'"

Do accusations of "racism" undermine the national discourse on race in America?

About.com Guest Commentator Jack Kerwick attempts to answer that question in this this week's column.

From the article:

During this election season, various charges of “playing the race card” and “racism” have been made by and against virtually everyone involved. Often -- though not always -- the two charges are regarded synonymously: to be found guilty of “playing the race card” is to be found guilty of “racism.”
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So poisonous is the accusation of “racism,” and so susceptible to abuse at the hands of demagogues who appropriate it as a weapon by which to advance their interests, that it may not be a bad idea to suspend the use of the very term indefinitely, until we have had time to really think about it.

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Added May 23, 2008:

My colleague Tom Head, the Civil Liberties Guide, is also running the About.com Race Relations site. Head wrote an excellent rebuttal to Kerwick's commentary called, "The Wrong Moratorium."

From the blog:

[Kerwick's] article reflects the ambiguity that many whites feel about the word "racism," an ambiguity that some people of color share, and an ambiguity that rests partly in the fact that race itself is a nonsense idea and it's very hard to create a really useful vocabulary around a nonsense idea. Race is a vehicle for oppression, a pseudoscientific way of color-coding caste bias to benefit the glorified con artists who invented it, and the terminology we use to talk about race now will probably sound ridiculous in 500 years. Race itself is racist.

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Regardless of your beliefs on this issue, it looks like an open discussion about race relations is already underway.