When Trump had his famous, or infamous, rally in Greenville, N.C., earlier this month — I’m talking about the “Send her back!” rally — there was much talk of racism. And I decided to jot a little tweet. Here’s how it went:
I’m gonna write a tweet that’s gonna tick a lot of people off. Reagan conservatives like me have been called racists — falsely and maliciously — all of our lives. So, to many Americans, every charge of racism, no matter how legitimate, rings hollow. Good job, wolf-criers.
Holy-moly. Somehow, this tweet got circulated on Left Twitter, and, boy, did I hear from them — the Left. Someone sent me a “meme” that showed a hollering person who was saying, “Let’s Get Ready to Ratio!” (Or maybe it was a GIF, not a meme. I don’t know the difference, if there is one.)
What’s “ratio”? Surfing around, I found a definition: “On the social media platform Twitter, a ratio, or getting ratioed, is when replies to a tweet vastly outnumber likes or retweets. This means people are objecting to the tweet and considering its content bad.”
Right. I got 7,500 replies. And only 1,200 “retweets” and 5,900 “likes.” Therefore, I was “ratioed.” And what did the ratioers say? “Racist, racist, racist.” Everyone and his brother called me a racist. I was dumped on by the high and mighty — including the beautiful television journalist Soledad O’Brien — and the low and un-mighty.
Incidentally, when hearing about Ms. O’Brien, I habitually think of an aria: “Laggiù nel Soledad” (from Puccini’s Fanciulla del West). Don’t we all?
I used to write about race a lot. Then I tapered off, mainly because there was scarcely anything new to say. In 2010, I poured a bit of myself into a brief essay, here. I wrote, “To be a conservative, or even anti-Left, is to be called a racist.” The editor of that piece, a young man, objected to this sentence. He thought it was untrue. I insisted it was true, as a generality.
Let me quote more fully:
To be a conservative, or even anti-Left, is to be called a racist. That much is written in stone. I have been called a racist ever since I began to express classical-liberal views, while in college. And it’s easy to be a racist, or rather, a “racist.” If you oppose preferences based on skin color, favoring colorblindness instead — you’re a racist.
Farther down, I wrote,
If you’re a conservative with any public role, you get used to being called a racist — but not really. And why should one become entirely inured to it? The charge of “racist” is about the worst that can be leveled in America. If we must merely shrug it off or ignore it, we’ve reached a sorry pass.
Yes. Back to my tweet, earlier this month. If you call Ronald Reagan a racist, and George Bush (both of them), and Bob Dole, and John McCain, and Mitt Romney . . . you get my drift. People are going to think, “Well, that’s just what they do. They call Republicans and conservatives racists automatically. It’s as meaningless as ‘fascist,’ out of some mouths.”
Yeah, the F-word — I’ve gotten that one too. I have a related memory. A prominent writer called me “a shill for the far Right.” Part of my response was: If you hold me to be “far Right,” what language are you going to have left over for the far Right?
While I’m on Memory Lane: I was talking with a friend several years ago — a conservative friend — and I said that I thought a certain politician on the right was “dangerous.” My friend smiled at me a condescending smile and said, “Why, Jay, you sound like a liberal!”
Sure. They call all of us dangerous: Reagan, the Bushes, Romney, Tinkerbell, everybody. That does not mean that, someday, somewhere, there won’t be a politician who is dangerous.
It is the responsibility of people, I think, not to debase words — words such as “racist,” “fascist,” and “anti-Semite.” There are such people in the world: racists, fascists, and anti-Semites. Indeed, the world is overrun with them, and their cousins (“ist”s and “ite”s of various sorts). If you confront the real thing and people are slow to believe you, because you’ve cried the word falsely a million times before, the slow-to-believe can be forgiven, or at least understood.
You know?