Some of My Best Friends ...

(First published in Bali Advertister, February 28, 2007)

“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” – Groucho Marx

E-mail from a British friend says that his “chum Ian, a bridal wear designer, has been commissioned to make the wedding dress for the future Mrs. Wayne Rooney, and for a number of other famous footballers’ floosies.”

That would be a great secondhand connection to fame except for this: How do you brag in a London pub about knowing the guy who’s to make the wedding dress for the bride of England’s most famous footballer, without having to head butt somebody every time you say “my chum Ian, a bridal wear designer”?

It raises some other troubling questions, too: How many famous footballers ever marry their floosies? If they do marry their floosies, on average, how many floosies do they marry over the course of a career? And, not least, how many times can I mention footballers’ floosies in this column before a mob of them fly here from the UK and practice drop kicks with me head?

How many groups of people have I insulted so far? I count five. Those counting at home may come up with different totals due to rounding errors. Should I call a press conference and apologize to anyone that might have been offended? Do I need to hire a therapist and a counselor to help me understand my ‘hatred’ for particular groups? Do I need an agent?

If you follow tabloid entertainment news, you know the names and quotes that come up next: Mel Gibson – “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”, Michael Richards – “We’d have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass”, Isaiah Washington – “I’m not your little faggot”, Jade Goody – “I’m not a racist”, and Tim Hardaway – “I hate gay people”.

Or, if your tastes run more to the political, we could go with Robert Ford and George Allen. Ford, a South Carolina state senator and a black American himself, said having African-American Barack Obama at the top of a U.S. Democratic ticket in 2008 would result in an across the board defeat for the Democratic Party. Ford then apologized to anybody he had caused pain, strangely including himself. Allen lost his bid for re-election to the US Senate after calling a man of Indian ancestry ‘macaca’ during a campaign stop in Virginia last year.

None of these episodes are particularly flattering to the people involved. I’m almost certain, though, that the round of apologies and the struggle-session press conferences that go with them are a broader offense. The idea seems to be that we who are not Mel, Michael, Isaiah, Jade, Tim, Robert, or George, would never harbor prejudicial feelings or thoughts about anyone based on race or other grouping, that only abnormal people could harbor such prejudicial feelings, and that those people need to be corrected by doctors of the mind so they can become normal like the rest of us, who don’t hate anybody.

But we do all harbor such feelings, even if we mask them in most situations, even if for particular individuals, we have been able to move past the general to the specific. We love to think that having one or two friends of such-and-so group means we have overcome our underlying prejudices for all such-and-sos in general. It doesn’t. Having one friend that is gay, Muslim, Jewish, or black, doesn’t mean we have overcome stereotypical images built over a lifetime – just as not liking one particular gay, Muslim, Jewish, or black person doesn’t mean we are committed racist neo-Nazis ready to start sending all such persons to the gas chambers and ovens.

Group recognition is a trait we all share, a defense system developed when we needed quickly to determine friend from foe, and we still habitually classify many, if not most, of the people we come across in a day according to the most convenient tribal grouping at hand. We simply don’t have time to get down to the specifics of every person that crosses our paths. In most cases, that is fine, unless we can’t move from the general to the specific when we need to, or unless we use the most convenient tribal grouping to choose who gets the promotion, who our daughters and sons can date and marry, who makes the team, who gets our vote, who lives, who dies.

It would seem to me that we’d be better off forgoing the reflexive genuflection of tearful apology every time a celebrity publicly crosses the gods of political correctness, and instead just be open about how racially and group minded we all are. We can’t help dividing the world into “we” and “they”. Once we accept that, we can better guard against our own prejudices when dealing with persons individually. And if some 15-minute-famer does slip and make an ass of him or herself, please, let the apologies be done in private and let’s stop wasting ink and airtime on them. Teary-eyed celebrities offend me.

But, uh, excuse me a moment, some footballers’ floosies and their bridal wear designers are at the door demanding an apology.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi