Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald

August 18, 2010

Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: “Dr. Laura’s Ignorance on Display” – some comments and questions on your column on Laura Schlesinger, PhD, AKA “The Ignorant White Slut”, in today’s Miami Herald.

Mr. Pitts,

If, as you say, you are from “Planet Negro” can I ask if it is going to replace Planet Pluto? Also, did it come from the Colored Asteroid Belt?

Dr. Laura dared to use the “dreaded ‘N’ word”, the word that White folk dare not use. Well, almost all White folk. There was an exception carved out for any Democratic Senators from West Virginia who were recruiters for, can you believe it, the friggin’ Ku Klux Klan, and answered to the name Exalted Kleagle. I don’t know what the requirements were to earn that merit badge but I am positive that burning some crosses was one of them. You’ll probably find this hard to believe. Type Robert Byrd into Google and see what comes up.

You mention “non-sequitur”. Then you say that there is “a big hole in Dr. Laura’s reasoning”. I mention that because my second paragraph is an example of “tu quoque”. It is fallacious Logic but excellent Rhetoric. As a proud legatee of the DWEM [DWEM? Send a SASE] tradition it makes me want to stand up and shout “Say it loud, I’m White and I’m Proud”. Does that put me in the same canoe as Dr. Laura?

You show a disdain for comedians and the effect they have on language. I hesitate to use the word “ignorant” lest you think I might share the racial attitudes of such famous Americans as Senator Sam Ervin and Senator J. William Fulbright.

See if you can follow this reverse time line.

I’ll write slowly.

George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley, Totie Fields, Lenny Bruce, Samuel Beckett, H.L. Mencken, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, Miguel Cervantes, Dante, Juvenal, Aristophanes.

I still think Fred Sandford saying that there is “nothing uglier than an ugly old white woman” was one of the funniest lines ever on TV. Archie Bunker had a few good ones too, didn’t he?

One thing that all the members on this list have in common is that they, to cite
Tom Wolfe, pushed the edge of the envelope out. That envelope was the one marked “language”. They affected society by saying and writing things that while important were not necessarily welcome.

If I go to the African/American Library in Fort Lauderdale and ask for Dick Gregory’s autobiography by its name would I be set upon by outraged Black youth turned ferally ferocious by my use of the language he uses? If I went to the desk and asked where I could find a copy of “dreaded ‘N’ word” by Dick Gregory would that be acceptable?

If the “noxious epithet [is] loathed by the vast majority against whom it is routinely hurled” is so evil why are there so many exceptions to it?

It is either malum per se or it is malum prohibitum. Either the word is evil on its face or it is not.

You say that there is a “problem for Conservatives in general who seek to contribute to a constructive racial dialogue”. I still like to describe myself as an old fashioned Liberal but only when I am in the shower. I guess that makes me a Conservative but one who is not necessarily looking for a “racial dialogue”.

The President’s wife told us that she has never been “proud” of her “mean” country. The Attorney General told us that we were all “cowards”. What part of “racial dialogue” would cover those examples?

Speaking of “racial dialogue” what would have happened if a Pat Buchanan or a Glenn Beck had said that the “only thing that Obama had ever run was his mouth”? What if either of them then said, like Jesse Jackson did, that they wanted to “cut his nuts off”? When Jesse Jackson had delivered one of his sotto voce anti-Semitic rants – It was “Hymietown”, wasn’t it? – he said his “joy bell” was out of tune that day. A “mean” country let him get away with it. Would such Christian Charity be forthcoming to any Conservative? Dumb question, right?

With regards to Blacks voting for other Blacks “without giving it much thought” I suggest that you take a peek at some of the voting districts in Florida. Elbridge Gerry would have been proud. Should O.J. Simpson or Willie Horton or H. Rap Brown present themselves to the voters they would be elected by numbers not seen outside of Chicago.

I guess the Red Queen was right. “Those words mean exactly what I want them to mean.”

Red Queen? Does that make me a McCarthyite homophobe?

Kevin Smith