Gerry Adams’s N-word tweet: racism is not binary

Some concepts comfortably accommodate binary description. Death is one. None of us will ever be a little bit dead; one is either among the choir invisible or one is not. Pregnancy is another. Who has ever found themselves "just pregnant enough"? It was once felt that gender fitted the binary model, but many of us now think differently.

What about the condition of being a racist? If we use racist language, however mild, does that automatically make us a racist? Are we then a racist forever? If not, then for how long must we behave ourselves before an amnesty is granted?

Gerry Adams is not a racist. As Gary Younge argued in the Guardian this week: "Racism is a system of oppression. It should not be reduced to series of gaffes." Quite right. But DjangoGate did kick up some absorbing questions about the slipperiness of that word.

You will know the story. Last weekend, while watching Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, the great comedian Gerry Adams tweeted that he was a "Ballymurphy n***er".

Old enough to remember Watergate, Adams should have known that the cover-up is invariably more damaging then the initial offence. A rapid, unequivocal and unadorned apology would have closed down the story. “I am, of course, aware that it is never appropriate for a white person, even when speaking ironically or quoting another source, to use that word.” That sort of thing.

Queasy equivalencies

Adams did

[ offer an apology ]

. Sadly, he also managed to compound outrage by drawing further queasy equivalencies. “Nationalists in Nth were treated like African Americans,”

[ he tweeted ]

. While constructing an argument for racial harmony, Adams used the unhappy words “I’ve never seen myself as white.” Remind me of that line from

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

“But ya are, Blanche. Ya are!”

Now we get to the nub of the current argument. In the course of the early skirmishes defenders pointed out that Adams had been a pallbearer at Nelson Mandela’s funeral and had always been a strong supporter of anti-racist causes. (More than a few, giving the impression that they were close personal friends of the late ANC leader, referred to him as “Madiba”.) This proved he was not a racist. Everybody could now shut up.

The N-word was once a lot more common in everyday usage. In 2013, acknowledging the shift in sensibilities, John Cleese permitted the BBC to excise it from a classic episode of Fawlty Towers. The sense is clear. The silly old major, explaining imperialistic distinctions between Indians and West Indians, reveals himself to be a racist. Cleese was not himself a racist for including the line in 1975. But he might have been declared a racist had he defended it 40 years later. Do we have that right?

Again and again, when a public figure is caught using potentially offensive language, the massed analysts ask whether that person is or is not a racist. Ron Atkinson went down this road. So did Martin Amis. Each commentator applies the litmus paper and announces an unequivocal result.

Spectrum

Rather than seeing the state of being a racist as a binary condition, we would be better off viewing it as existing across a spectrum. It is more of a wave than a particle. This is not to suggest there are no situations when the word can be used with undiluted gusto. At one end of the spectrum we find neo-Nazis, racial eugenicists and Charles Manson. (He won’t sue, surely.) At the other end we find, well, almost nobody. There are, I suppose, people who have never made a single, even mildly unwise generalisation about, say, the Germans, the French or (perish the thought) the Irish, but I can’t say I have met any. Most decent folk are, nonetheless, lurking somewhere near the opposite extreme to that occupied by Heinrich Himmler and the Ku Klux Klan.

The issue is addressed with some elegance in the musical Avenue Q. "Everyone's a little bit racist sometimes / Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crimes," one tune argues. "Maybe it's a fact we all should face / Everyone makes judgments based on race." In other words we all occupy space on the racist spectrum.

No argument is being made for a relaxation of vigilance. Indeed, an insistence on treating “racist” (in its nominal form) as a binary concept can let those using inappropriate language off the hook.

One can imagine a fellow slinging around such a phrase in an unguarded moment. This person’s pals then point out that he has an exemplary record in standing up against discrimination. We all agree he is not a racist. There is, thus, no reason to chastise him for bandying offensive epithets. So goes the shaky argument.

Such things do happen, you know.