Charles Blow has a piece on loaded language which I cannot agree with more, or less. His starting point is the largely lily-white biker-gang violence of last weekend, which he generically relates to the preceding violence of Baltimore and Ferguson, all black. "There is something about black violence that makes some people leap to a racialized conclusion that the violence is about our fraying culture — that it’s not simply about people behaving violently," writes Blow, "but about the entirety of the environment from which they sprang. Black violence stops being about individual people, and starts being about the whole of a people."
Would any fair-minded reader be compelled by disagreement with that? With every black ghetto's black riot (of which there are shockingly few … considering) we get the usual platoon of usually white "character" roadsters on cable TV — the bourgeois Burkeans decrying the breakdown of the black family; it's about missing fathers and welfare mothers and internal-institutional collapse, all of which is inherently "colored." Black "thuggishness" is both the symptom and result of this cultural breakdown.
WSJ-reading aristocrats and middle-class moralists are rarely so happy as when they can look down their aquiline noses at "those people." Poor white violence, Wall Street thievery and all manner of white-collar malefactions say nothing of whites as a "people," but a few hundred black thugs bespeak a racial problem — racial failings and inadequacies.
Against this, Blow protests in question form: "Does the violence in Waco say something universal about white culture or Hispanic culture? Even the question sounds ridiculous." Which it does. Yet it's here, it seems to me, that Charles Blow derails: "President Obama and the mayor of Baltimore were quick to use the loaded label 'thugs' for the violent rioters there. That the authorities have not used that word to describe the far worse violence in Waco makes the contrast all the more glaring."
Somehow, according to Blow, the thuggish whites of Waco are let off the linguistic hook in society's characterization of them not as thugs but as "outlaws" and "bikers," which, "while pejorative to some, still evoke a certain romanticism in the American ethos. They conjure an image of individualism, adventure and virility."
Do they? To me, and I should think to millions of others, they conjure images of ignorance, organized crime, wanton brutality, misplaced masculinity, arrested minds, utterly marginalized lives, grime and vomit, not to mention really poor taste in all things sartorial.
To call them mere thugs would be a terminological upgrading, it further seems. And to say that only "some" of us — which is to suggest, a dismissible minority — hear the term "outlaw bikers" as a "pejorative" is to imply the same sort of misguided generalization that Blow condemns.
There's no doubt that Corleoneism has been romanticized in American culture, yet much of that romance entails ways in which its spidery Michaels have webbed their way into the broader culture itself (our businesses, our politics, Catholicism, even our philanthropies). We rarely if ever refer to these thugs as outlaws. Those Waco-type bikers, on the other hand, are proper outlaws in the literal sense of the word — they are outside the law in every way; indeed, they are altogether outside their racial communities, be they white or Hispanic. They are as much outcommunitarians and cultural, self-willed outcasts as they are outlaws.
Thus if violent bikers are outside every culture and every law and every community but their own, how could idiosyncratic references to them be improper?