no-traction Jackson

Finally I hear some people making sense about Jesse Jackson’s sad and stupid appropriation of the Michael Richards’s racist rant “crisis” for his own (well-intentioned) ends (racial harmony). Perhaps people were reacting to the means he suggested for attaining those ends—the first of which was his ban on the word “nigger.” Period. (What? you got free speech issues? Jackson claims the word is “unprotected.”)

As usual, though, he made it into a crusade and took things too far: Withholding his forgiveness of Richards last weekend even after the washed-up comedian had spent two hours “confessing” and repenting on Jackson’s radio show; urging a boycott of the new Seinfeld DVD, and accusing CNN (while on CNN’s air) of being “all day, all night, all white”—it was a massive overreaction.

The L.A. Times reports that some of Jackson’s detractors are prominent blacks (not that you’ll see them on television—they’re too rational, and the media would rather cover the hysteria, and the repeated confessions of Richards. Because it’s great television):

Joe Hicks, vice president of the civil rights organization Community Advocates Inc., called the move to ban the word “just silly and outrageous.” Outside the stray white bigot, the N-word is pervasive only in black communities and among hip-hop and rap artists, “not in the business world, not in the American court system, not in the government.”

Hicks, an African American and former director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, said Waters and others shouldn’t be trying to alter the course of contemporary urban culture and accused them of “racial opportunism.”

Hicks finds the essence of the problem:

“Here’s this guy [Richards], who’s been nearly out of work with virtually no career to speak of, who’s hand-grenaded his career in front of the whole world … and he’s supposed to be some sort of barometer for race relations? It’s the ultimate absurdity,” Hicks said.

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law, who’s written about the use of the “n” word, is troubled by the brouhaha over this “crisis”—and specifically about the drive to ban its use—because it doesn’t actually address racism. It addresses only our behavior in the public square.

“There is something troublesome going on,” Kennedy said, “when this amount of energy is targeted toward people and a phenomenon that in the overall scheme of things is probably marginal.”

The call for the boycott of Seinfeld DVD hasn’t worked, either.

Ironically, the publicity over Richards’ tirade may help spur sales of “Seinfeld: Season 7″ on DVD, which Jackson encouraged holiday shoppers to refrain from buying.

After less than a week on the market, it had zoomed to the 11th most popular DVD selling on Amazon.com.

As culture war issues go, the use of the word “nigger” (among other slurs) is actually a really important one to consider and to discuss openly, as John Ridley wrote recently. I wrote about it here.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a new phenomenon to consider [see Hicks above]: “racial opportunism.”