Archive for the “race” Category

Over in the comments at Booker, I saw somethin that kinda caught my attention. The discussion over there is about the code switching (or the lack thereof) of the Obama family, kinda centering on President Obama’s use of the phrase, “Nah, we straight” when he was at Ben’s Chili Bowl. While I’m kinda interested in the Obamas as a very visible example of code-switching, this ain’t really about them. It’s about the idea of code switching and its function.

In the comments over there, I mentioned that I give the side-eye to Black folks who don’t code switch. It’s not necessarily that I regard them as less-Black or anything like that, I just don’t like the way it sounds. But then, I readily concede that I’m prejudiced. I like my Black folks to sound a certain way, and I like my white folks to sound some other way. That’s just me. At the end of the day, jokers talk how they talk and it’s all good, but I still have my preferences. That’s why my daughter’s valley girl-sounding talk is mildly irritating to me, when you get down to it.

See, here’s the thing: I expect folks to sound profesisonal in the workplace. Depending on the specifics of the job, sounding “professional” may entail using more jargon than vernacular and effectively morphing to that generic “mid-america”-type newscaster speech style. I don’t have a problem with that. I do it myself. One time I was talkin to somebody on the phone and he said I reminded him of Mike Huckabee. (He meant it as a compliment, so I took it as one.) Now the people who know me personally would be staggered by that. One of my friends who I’ve known since grade school but hadn’t talked to in several years (Facebook is the truth) just about died when I told him that I had taught English. You talmbout bein strecthed beyond the ability to suspend disbelief… But that’s me. That’s what I do, and that’s what I grew up doing. And because we tend to normalize our behavior, and that of our families, that’s pretty much what I expect everybody to do. I’ve actually had people tell me that my speech sounded like an affectation, but that’s only because of the context in which they originally met me. People who knew me from grad school generally expected me to sound like I did in grad school when on the street. Maybe within a degree or two. But my work/school talk is radically different from how I sound any context other than those. The fact that they were surprised only means that I had switched very well. (And that’s even before we take into account how much I say “14.”)

My usual metaphor for language as far as code-switching goes is shoes. You wear the right shoe for the right occasion. Just like you put on the right linguistic style – diction, vocabulary, all’a that – in the appropriate circumstances. Now I know that there’s some Black folks who don’t code switch. They stay in that “Rockport” all day. And that’s fine. I don’t begrudge them…too much (cept Ave 2.0 ^X). Me? When I’m anywhere but at work, it’s all about that “Adidas,” and more than likely, it’s gon be them “flip-flops.”

So I was thinking about some of what Dollar Bill said and to fully explore the idea, I figured it would work better if I ran it as a podcast..or two.

Linguistic dialectical development Part 1

I use the word ‘nigga’ a lot. Some folks would say inordinately so. Recently while I had a pretty long drive, I tried to figure out why. But in writing about it publicly, I hafta kinda write some things out long-hand that I already know that undergird my usage. So allow me to spell it out and define the terms of my own usage.

While I’m keenly aware of the spaces that the word “nigga” traditionally occupies, I’d say that its place in my idiolect doesn’t really correspond to any of those. First of all, it’s not a race-specific word. Anybody can be a nigga. Lately, Andy Reid has been a whole lotta nigga. (Course, Andy Reid is a whole lotta whatever he is.) So has my car. And my roommate’s cat. (I just about slapped the shavings outta that fool when she hopped up on the counter and started nibblin on some of my ham.) Of course, it goes without saying that people in traffic – when not being “persons” are niggas. Point being, there is no distinctly racial element to it. I mean really, as I use it, a “nigga” doesn’t necessarily even hafta be a person. There’s almost an anthropomorphic sense of the word. So it’s not at all about Black people, specifically. Although it can be that.

I should also point out that ‘nigga’ is not necessarily a pejorative term. I think the whole nigga-as-term-of-endearment argument has been done to death, and I do use it like that on occasion, but more often than not, that’s not how I’m using it either. So, let’s say that I’m listening to Bud Powell’s recording of Tempus Fugit. I might say, “I first heard this joint 21 years ago when I was listening to that nigga, Dick Buckley’s, jazz show on WBEZ the night Harold Washington died.” For one thing, I don’t know what race Dick Buckley was (is?), so that automatically rules out any race-specific usage. Second, the word “nigga” here can be swapped with any of a number of words, and it would still make sense. Really, I could take that whole specifier out and the sentence would work just as well. But clearly, there is no pejorative there. It’s acting like a descriptive phrase, but it’s really not, because it’s not describing anything. It’s just kinda there. Another example, with me still listening to Bud Powell, might have me saying, “That nigga played an exorcistic run from :37 to :40.” In this case, the overall meaning of the sentence is not even neutral, it’s fairly effusive praise. So to be clear, the word itself is neither race-specific nor negative. So what is it?

Like I said, I put a good deal of thought into it, then it hit me: I use “nigga” as a euphemism for “motherfucker.” Because I’m at a stage where I’m not cussing, the four-syllable (t4-S) word doesn’t get run anymore, but its specter still looms over my idiolect. So in swapping it out, I subbed in the next-closest non-cuss word, which is ‘nigga.’ If you look back at all the examples, if you put in t4-S, it makes perfect sense. Very rarely does t4-S have any meaning that’s specific to human beings, much less any specific racial connotation. It’s just there. Which is why my usage of the term generally doesn’t either. Cuz when I’m sayin ‘nigga,’ I’m not sayin ‘nigga,’ I’m sayin’ t4-S.

Now, the limitation here is that “nigga” can’t be used in all the same ways that the t4-S can. For instance, t4-S can be made into an adjective by adding -in(g). “Nigga” doesn’t work like that, even if I pronounce it with the -er, primarily because it’s not based on a verb, as t4-S is. What’s even more interesting is that I don’t even know if I have a substitute for t4-S as an adjective. (Lookin at it on the screen, I might fool around and start using “four-syllable” as an adjectival euphemism. Almost nobody would know what I’m talkin about, but that’s never really mattered to me anyway. “That nigga bumper bout to fall off his four-syllable car.” Or “That nigga played the devil out that four-syllable bass.”) That’s weird, in a way, but not so much. Cuz I think I’ve got plenty of adjectives at my disposal. It’s very possible that the only I used t4-S as an adjective was for the rhythm of the sentence or for its punctuative and/or intensifying value. Like that time I called somebody a 4-syllable “inept-ass” whateverwhatever. The real insult was based around ‘inept.’ The rest of it was just for the flow, even though the word inept is really awkward in that context.

Now obviously, I know that most people don’t use “nigga” like that, and even more don’t hear it like that, so I don’t use it in mixed company. In this case, mixed company is people who don’t use the word or have a philosophical bent against it. Or it could mean 99.85 percent of white people. That .15 percent would be my play sister’s fiance. I say ‘nigga’ around him all the time, cuz I say it around her all the time. But I never say it around him if she ain’t there.

Stepped on a tin, my story ends.

Here’s what I was hoping for: I wanted to see some of the more prominent Black conservatives (or in their case, would it be lowercase ‘b’, capital ‘C?’) take a time out from their usual schtick and say, something like, ‘You know what? Policy-wise, I don’t agree with Obama on much. Maybe nothing at all. But I’d be intellectually dishonest if I didn’t recognize the momentousness of this occasion.’ Just that. No ‘…but let me tell you how/why it doesn’t matter/Blackfolks gon’ mess it up’-type jive. Even if it was shorter than their regular columns, there could easily have been some reflection on what the moment might have meant to their parents and then some optimistic – even (dare I say it?) hopeful commentary on what this means for the future. Didn’t really happen. The ones who did recognize the moment gave that short shrift, and then went right back to their regular routine. And therein lies what I perceive to be one of the great challenges to Black conservatives as it pertains to getting their message out to a wider audience. No jive: forget about your personal opinions for a minute. If you’re trying to reach people and you can’t recognize that a moment is important to them and connect, then either you don’t wanna reach em, or you have no idea how to do so. (Nevermind the fact that people all over the whole WORLD thought it was a big moment….) With national black Conservative (nah, i’ma be charitable and give ‘em the capital ‘B’) pundits and columnists, I actually think it’s the former. I’ll decline to guess what it might be about, but suffice it to say that if it’s something greater than sounding off in an echo chamber, I can’t really tell.

Having said that, cuz I can rightly anticipate that the question is gonna come, what I advocate for is the same thing that I always advocate for: at a political level, Black conservatives won’t get anywhere if they can’t connect with the people. Same thing on a personal level, actually, but even the people who agitate for community reform do so within the context of politics, because there’s not really another scale at which the actions of masses of people are discussed. (Well, maybe sociological, but intrinsic to politics is the idea that eventually some action will come out of the ideas; sociology is more descriptive than prescriptive.) A big part of that connection comes from doing and being where the people are. Don’t matter if you have the better idea if you can’t get the people to follow you — or even get the people to not follow anybody if they’re used to thinking they need somebody to follow.

This was a chance to edge a foot in the door. There’ll be others.

I don’t straight-out cosign nobody hardly, but one person who usually comes very close on the linguistic nuances of racial speech is Jeremy Pierce. In a recent post, he outlines his philosophy for giving people the benefit of the doubt when racism is possible but not clearly established.

For the same reason that we don’t assume guilt with crimes, we should also not assume guilt with moral accusations that aren’t crimes. It’s basic human decency, and I find it sorely lacking among people who throw racism charges around without strong evidence. Being hesitant in particular cases when you don’t know for sure is not the same thing as denying that racism is real. No, it’s just being unsure about particular cases when you don’t know for sure. I can’t count how many times I’ve been accused of justifying racism when I’ve pointed out that a racism charge is unwarranted. Only if you don’t know the distinction between being true and being proved to be true can you make such a charge. You don’t need to deny that racism is real or even that it’s widespread and so deep-seated that it’s hard to spot in order to point out that a particular case is not clearly racist and thus unfair to call racist, and this will be true no matter how many such particular cases you find.

I’ve given a moral argument for my policy of giving people the benefit of the doubt in cases of potential but unestablished racism. I don’t think it should have to bring any negative racial effects as long as those who question racist accusations in particular cases are willing to acknowledge it when it’s clear and insist that there are probably plenty of cases of real racism where we unfortunately can’t be sure and thus be able to call them on it. My sense is that conservatives on race are sorely lacking in that sort of thing, and that’s why every attempt to follow a policy like mine gets seen as an attempt to justify actual racism. But I don’t see how that mistake on the part of people who follow a policy like mine can justify the accusation of trying to justify racism, as has been said about me many times in the comments at Racialicious whenever I’ve said that a charge of racism is going beyond what we can be sure of. But people prone to leap to racism charges without enough evidence are also prone to leap to racism-justifying charges without reason.

COS.

To add on to it a little bit, I still think there’s needs to be another term in there that can classify degrees of racism. Cuz even for people who think that every potential example of racism is the real thing, there still has to be an acknowledgment that they’re not all on the same level. And I’m specifically referring to verbal instances here. For instance, if the article Al Sharpton was complaining about earlier this week, where the author congratulated New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin for “tightening the noose” on Plaxico Burress, really does qualify as racism, that would hafta be a fairly low grade. Distinguishing degrees, I think, is fairly important because it would open up some possibilities for actually discussing.

It would never work, though, because most people aren’t really interesting in having racial discussions at that level. It’s too easy to leave it as a nebulous concept. It’s easy to throw, easy to block, and easy to choose sides. To really break it down, it would be necessary to dissect the term and see what’s what. And I agree with Jeremy that when intent can’t be determined, it’s better to give a person the benefit of the doubt. Cuz there are enough instances where the intent is clear to leave the questionable cases to the side.

As my two or three long-time readers know, I’m pretty prejudiced. That means as long as it doesn’t conflict with one of my main rooting interests, the Eagles and the Steelers, I pretty much ride for any team that has a Black coach and/or starting quarterback. Because of that, the Vikings were one of my unofficial squads for years. Yesterday, their quarterback for much of that time, Daunte Culpepper, retired because he couldn’t get a job. (If you can’t get a job, does that mean you’re really retired? If the Bears, for instance, come calling in week 3, I don’t think he’ll sit there and be like, ‘I ain’t goin.’) While we can point to several scrubby white quarterbacks who have had nowhere near the level of success that Culpepper has had, I don’t know that the racial angle is quite the right one here. Daunte had a chance to get picked up as a backup for Green Bay a long time ago, but he chose not to. There’s an argument to be made, I suppose, but maybe he just ain’t good enough to be a starting QB in the League any more. What I’m really wondering, though, is whether the age of the Black quarterback is over. That is, have we passed the critical mass point, where Black QBs are just regular players who can fail or succeed on their own merits?

Really, I don’t think the answer to this question can be answered by starters, though. It’s the backups. That’s what makes Pep’s case so interesting. He thinks he’s still a starter. No other team in the League agrees. They ain’t gon’ sign him (or pay him) like a starter, but they’ll let him come in as a backup. I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as him being denied an opportunity to play. So if washed-up Black quarterbacks are getting chances to sign as backups, then I’d say we’re pretty much there. The high bar is fairly well set. Even without a second Super Bowl win, Black quarterbacks have had enough collective success to dead any question of whether they’re good enough to play the position. What we’re waiting on is the low bar. When you can have a Black game-manager quarterback, who’s only expected to not make turnovers, we’ll be just about there. When there’s a cadre of Black scrubs who can bounce from team to team without having really accomplished anything, then we’ll really be there. Aaron Brooks was almost that dude, but he’s out of the League too. (Meanwhile, look at the quarterback situation in Chicago. Come on. Culpepper can’t be worse than any of those dudes.)

What Culpepper’s retirement also does is cement the fact that Donovan was the class of the class. Not that there was any doubt, but I’m sayin’. As pretty as the numbers were that Culpepper put up, a certain number 84 had a lot to do with those. So in retrospect, I can’t tell if Culpepper was that dude and Moss was that dude, or if Moss was that dude and made Culpepper look better. Cuz we know Donovan was that dude with certified SCRUBS at the X and Z. (If anything’s a conspiracy, it’s Andy Reid’s refusal to keep a real, live #1 receiver on the roster.)

Fatimah Ali in today’s Philadelphia Daily News: If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness – and hopelessness!

Okay, okay. We get it. She wants Obama to win. Full-fledged race and class war, though? I can’t even take that seriously. If anything, I would be less-surprised by a face and class war coming after an Obama win than a McCain win. But personally, I don’t think it’s coming.

I would get all upset and bent out of shape about this, but the truth is that some writers seem to work with the sole purpose of getting the people all siced up. Whether Ms. Ali actually believes in a coming race war, or whether she just said that because she knows she writes in a polarized market like Philadelphia, I don’t know. But I do know that it’s getting her some attention. Maybe that’s all she really wanted in the first place.

I don’t even rep political parties like that, but one of the things that drives me crazy about some Black Republicans is the apparent need to claim historical figures, as if that’s somehow significant now. The party of Lincoln. While it’s true that Lincoln was a Republican, I think the historical antecedent argument misses on a couple fronts.

First of all, I guess I hafta reiterate the fact that it’s only some Black Republicans who do it, because others are of the idea that the Republican Party shouldn’t really do anything to appeal to Black voters. It should stand on its own merits and values; if you favor lower taxes, personal responsibility, smaller government, etc., then the Republican Party’s for you. Republicans from that school of thought chafe at the idea of the Republican Party doing something specific as “outreach” to Black voters. Now granted, that doesn’t seem to be an especially large proportion of Black Republicans, or of the Republican Party as a whole — or else, it’s just not something they’d say out loud. Still, there seems to be an element of political cognitive dissonance within the historical appeal.

The other, bigger turnoff for me is this: It’s 2008. How you gon’ make an appeal to Lincoln? The Party of Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln? The 16th President, Abraham Lincoln? Civil War Abraham Lincoln? 1864 Abraham Lincoln? 144 YEARS AGO Abraham Lincoln? That’s supposed to sway somebody? Or else, putting party claims on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While he may, in fact, have been a Republican in the 1950’s, you ain’t gon’ tell me that he would’ve been in the same party as Nixon and Goldwater in the 60’s. Seriously. And even if I could suspend my disbelief enough to imagine a party with an umbrella for King and Goldwater, I still don’t know what that would have do do with why voters should pull that lever today.

Politics, like football, is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately sport. If we’re supposed to vote Republican because of Lincoln, we might as well vote Whig. He started out Whig, after all. For me, it’s not a question of whether Black folks should vote Republican. Black folks should vote their conscience and their interest just like everybody else. It’s not even a question of whether the Republican Party should court the Black vote. There’s nothing wrong with Black folks having a say in the Republican platform, same as other groups do. To claim historical figures as Republicans and argue that present-day Black folks should vote Republican because those dudes were Republicans is a cheap way to go about getting anybody to vote. In fact, for me personally, it’s more off-putting than inviting. Don’t give me no decades-old political celebrity endorsement, tell me what’s in it for me right now today.

John Mark Reynolds has an extremely interesting post on politics vis a vis profanity. In it, he surmises:

To paraphrase Senator Edwards, there are two Americas. There is the America where calling your opponent a (insert profanity here) freak is normal and the Other Places where it is not. Vulgar America is a place where blasphemy, the real kind, is still considered “daring” and the only offense would be feeling offended by it. There are Other Places where using the Lord’s name in vain is still considered rude.

If you live mostly in one place, then the other seems weird to you. In the Other Places, a lady or gentleman might swear (though with apologies later) when very angry. The “frankly Scarlet” line of attack is tolerated, if not encouraged in extreme circumstances.

While Reynolds’ piece is primarily focused on the political ramifications of this cultural split, I’m more interested in the sociological implications. He notes,

Senator Obama is best understood as coming out of the blend of government and academic conferences and non-profits that often views itself as the best part of the nation. He “gets” that world . . . including the new rules of Vulgar America. As a result, the harsh words of Jeremiah Wright (”d- America”) do not sound so harsh to him and opposition to them must be all about race.

He repudiates some of the “ideas” of Reverend Wright, in good academic fashion with no clarity about which ideas he rejects. Even most Democrat primary voters don’t see how alienating these words are, because at least a big plurality of them live and work in Vulgar America.

Divorcing it from the explicitly political, I’d hafta say that I’m from Vulgar America. Not saying that I grew up with a bunch of people who cuss like sailors (I’ve heard that my mother cussed once, but I’ve never actually heard her cuss.), but the groups that he cites as being the constituents of Vulgar America have tended to be the circles I’ve traveled in my adult life. But then, I think there’s a degree to which he oversimplifies the differences in Vulgar America and Other America. Specifically, I think there are people in Other America who do (or would, if they heard the entire sermon) understand where Reverend Wright, for instance, is coming from, even if they disagree with it. In other words, I don’t know that the rhetorical devices of Vulgar America, for lack of a better term (pun intended), are as much of a disconnect as he supposes. While I am certain that there are people who shut off completely when they hear “vulgar” phrasing, my general impression is that cussing is not as off-putting as Reynolds would have us believe. But then, I probably wouldn’t know because I live in Vulgar America.

But thinking about it a little more, and perhaps from a dramatically different angle, I’m curious about how Black “Vulgar America” is. Now what I’m not suggesting is that all Black folks cuss regularly, or even abide cussing in their presence, because ultimately his point is not about the specific vocabulary of vulgarity. While Reynolds is careful to make academia the central locus of Vulgar America, thereby allowing it to influence pundits on both the left and right, the way he describes Other America …They will tolerate a dismissive McCain vulgarity in [terrorist fascism's] direction, but they don’t want to hear their sacred things (God, duty, honor, country) dismissed that way. For some reason, that line fills me with a very specific image of what Other America looks like, and the picture I see looks a lot like the crowd at a tractor pull, a NASCAR event, or at Graceland. Now, this may not at all be Reynolds’ intent, but that’s kinda what I’m seeing. I see superimposed flags and crosses. I see people with a “love it or leave it” mentality, which is not where most of the Black folks I know come from, regardless of their political bent. See, most of the Black folks I’ve known in my life (which means the overwhelming majority of the people I’ve known in my life), Democratic, Republican, Independent, and other, have no problems understanding that loving America, or being proud of it, is not the same as uncritical acceptance of everything that goes on here. In fact, if I’m honest about it, the only Black folks I’ve ever “known” who have intimated otherwise are ones I “know” only via their writing. (And for real, I personally believe that the timbre of their arguments is amped up a bit to elicit reactions. My guess is that if I actually knew those people, the ideas I’d hear expressed would be quite a bit more nuanced.) And again, I’m not saying that the “God, honor, duty, country” set can’t include any Black people, but my guess is that if it does, there aren’t a whole, whole lot of us in there. Not if those are the main criteria.

To take it a little further afield, I think that the designation of “vulgar” is very much class-based. I mean, if you do the etymology, there’s no question that certain words got acceptance by “cultured” folk because those were the words the “cultured” folks used. I mean, for real – the word “vulgar” itself is rooted in the idea that “there’s a lower class and we ain’t it.” Now for much of American history, the “we ain’t it” class has been Us. Commensurate with that, many of our cultural products have been regarded as “vulgar” (at least at their inception), even when they reflected high artistry. (Hello, Jazz, et al) Hence, while I’m fairly sure that Reynolds’ by no means intended to automatically include Black folks in Vulgar America, I wonder if his description of Other America inadvertently excludes us.

But then at the same time, I’m also thinking that what he says about Other America, “they don’t want to hear their sacred things dismissed…” is true of any group, even Vulgar America. The only line of demarcation between the Other America he describes and another Other America is what constitutes the “scared things.” Cuz my guess is that for even people who cuss all the time, there are certain people/things/ideas/institutions for which certain words are always inappropriate. But that’s just me guessin’. I probably don’t know, because it’s pretty much a lock that I don’t live in Reynolds’ Other America.

As is typical around this time of year, particularly since this is a deca-anniversary of his assassination, we are hearing a lot about the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For the most part, depending on the political bent of the author, the commentary focuses on the degree to which we have or have not achieved his dream. But the question of whether we’ve made it is a deceptive one, because even though “I Have A Dream” was possibly his best speech, and certainly his most famous one, I don’t think that his dream was static enough to really measure. Moreover, by the time he got to “I Have Been To The Mountaintop,” I would say that his dream had changed somewhat. No longer was he focused primarily on Civil Rights; his view had expanded. He had begun to look at poverty in a far wider scope, including international poverty in his critiques.

What’s a little more interesting to me, though, is to consider the fact that 40 years after his death, King has pretty much become all things to all people. Among capital-C Conservatives, there is this intense focus on the line, “I have a dream that one day my four children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” (I’ve actually seen one blog that claims King as a conservative. (!)) For those people, I’m curious about how they deal with the rest of what King had to say. Taking that line in isolation sounds nice, and it seems like it would refute the concept of “identity politics,” only in many instances, it seems that that quote is used solely to justify some type of inaction; either something shouldn’t be done, or it should be stopped. (Mr. Connerly, I’m lookin at you.) Only problem is, that takes the quote squarely out of its context. It seems to me that many of the people who use that quote now do so because they feel that people with their skin color are being held back, not out of concern for the content of anybody’s character. Or maybe I should say that being selfish creatures, we tend to automatically give ourselves a check in the ‘character’ box, so when we think somebody else got what we wanted, it must be due to something else. Only thing is, these jokers railing against Affirmative Action must be out of their minds if they think the situation in which they’re using Dr. King’s phrase is identical to, nearly the same as, or even mildly resembles the situation in the South in the early 1960s. As such, attempts to reuse that phrase are misguided at best, intellectually dishonest at worst.

Now that’s not to say that I don’t think that a “raceless” society is not an admirable goal, because it is. I just don’t think that the ones who made it that way can change it, because they’re not the ones who really feel the effect of what happened. In a way, it’s like a relationship where one partner cheated. Even though the cheating party brought the 3rd party into the relationship, it’s the one who got cheated on who ultimately lets that person out of the relationship, even if the 3rd party has been physically absent for a good deal of time. White folks writ large cannot make a case for a raceless society because white folks writ large both engineered and benefited from keeping the society race-based. Because of that, it’s not hard to believe that most “colorblind” talk on their part is a means to keep the status quo, since we know that even with the advances Black folks have made, there’s still a significant disparity in the way folks are treated. And no, I’m not talkin about no multivariable super-statistic, like wealth creation or infant mortality, which can be explained by any of a number of factors. I’m talkin about fairly straightforward stuff like whether a person with an identifiably Black name’s resume gets rejected when the resume of a white-sounding name (which I probably have) gets a call. I’m talkin about the fact that a first-time Black offender is more likely to get time for the same crime than a white offender. That’s straight-up one-to-one comparison. When you can tell me those types of vestiges of racism are gone, or at least statistically insignificant, then it’s time to declare race as a factor completely dead. Until then, while I personally believe it’s not as much of a factor as it once was, I can’t be mad when I hear somebody who thinks differently.