Where will the madness end? Seriously.The Washington Post sent a reporter to town a few weeks ago to attempt to capture in prose our "different state of race relations."
As lazy journalists on safari will do, the reporter found several black Utahns with predictable horror stories to tell; dutifully plugged into conventional wisdom, statistic and stereotype; marvelled at the state's real and imagined developmental delays and then produced a lengthy bit of journalistic imperialism with a few wry turns of phrase:
"Come to the Beehive State, where race relations is a topic of bracing freshness."
I dismissed it as the easy work of an oh-so-sophisticated coastal journalist - the kind who marvel at Rocky Anderson's anti-Bush protests and assume all Utah women wear the FLDS flour sack dress.
But then David and Elizabeth Lawson validated every condescending word.
The West Jordan couple who designed a monkey sock puppet in honor of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama still don't get it.
"We don't want to say goodbye," they said in a press release earlier this week.
I wish they would.
Last week, when the blogosphere was peppered with pictures of the suited monkey, the Lawsons wondered what all the fuss was about. They insisted they made the puppet out of "affection" for America's first black presidential nominee. But they pledged to return payments and offered a non-apology for offending anyone. (Conscience didn't kick in; the toy's manufacturer pulled out, leaving them in the lurch.)
Then the next day, with flowery prose, the Lawsons pledged to continue selling the $39.99 doll and a cream-colored McCain version at www.sockpoliticians.com.
Through it all, they went on the offensive, feebly trying to flip centuries of racist American history and imagery: They lectured the rest of us for clinging to our interpretations of stuffed monkeys.
"We don't think in terms of myths, fables, fairy tales and folklore," they wrote, apparently, in all sincerity. Their sock puppet would somehow heal the racial divide.
In an aside, they asked their critics to stop assuming they are Mormon (they aren't), cease stereotyping Utahns as racist and "refrain from unkind remarks about our neighbors and friends of the Mormon faith." They told a Tribune reporter the Deseret News and KSL Radio are their "local media voice." They worry more about an anti-Mormon backlash than about making money reviving a painful remnant of the Jim Crow South.
"When you're marketing these kinds of images and attach a person's name to them, you have a high burden of responsibility," says Forrest Crawford, Weber State University's vice president of diversity. "You have an obligation to really ask yourself a lot of questions about what your intentions are. Who gains? Who is harmed? Embedded in free enterprise is responsibility and judgment."
Crawford is patient, willing to give the Lawsons the benefit of the doubt, chalk their stupidity up to living in lily-white Utah or the dearth of slave narrative reading in high school English classes. He'd like to talk to them.
He's more charitable than I am. I can't decide if the Lawsons are cynical race-baiters, completely clueless or both. Like West Jordan Sen. Chris Buttars, who thoughtlessly amped up another lawmaker's joke by calling a piece of legislation a "dark, ugly thing" and clued the Post in to Utah's embarrassing insensitivities, the Lawsons seem oblivious to the hurtful fallout of their little Internet venture.
But ignorance only works as an excuse for so long. Now that the Lawsons know better, they still are willing to cater to and capitalize on the worst of human nature: bigotry.
So in conclusion, I'm discouraged by 21st century racism every time I hear about it and encouraged by the bad press it's getting and it not being okay on the whole by the vast majority of America.
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Update
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New Button Being Sold:
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