Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

On Imagining Foes, Imagining Friendship \\ 379
defining oneself within or outside of the label, rather than challenging the prejudice
and judgmentalism of the marking process at all. I think that this resort to
a "them-us" dichotomy, or an "I'm different" strategy, is perhaps the most prevalent
individual response to bigotry, as well as the most destructive.
Fourth, there is the opposite move—and perhaps the most prevalent institutional
response to bigotry—the tendency to generalize rather than to exceptionalize,
to make shrill self-absorption a general feature of all women, who were portrayed
as possessing a variety of generally negative qualities. Women of all ethnicities
are bitchy, stupid, fluffy, greedy, and sacrificial ran the logic of a narrative
that played sexism against anti-Semitism, and played general stereotype against
its subcomponents. Thus, "equal opportunity bimbo-ism" was proffered as an odd
model of the way in which tolerating intolerance emerges as the new norm for tolerance
itself.
The powerfully complicated baggage of this new-age tolerant intolerance was
perhaps most painfully visible in the incomprehensibly miscalculated spoof
undertaken by actor Ted Danson of his then-girlfriend comedienne Whoopi
Goldberg, in which Danson donned blackface, ate watermelon, joked about their
sex life and her gemtalia, and used the word "nigger" repeatedly. Claiming to be
mystified by the storm of public reaction that ensued, much was made of the
claim that Whoopi had approved of the material, even helped write it and that
therefore it couldn't be racist.
Scarcely two months after that fiasco, Goldberg's recipe for "Jewish American
Princess Fried Chicken" was published in a book entitled Cooking for Litcbfield
Hills. The recipe "instructs you to 'Send a chauffeur to your favorite butcher shop
for the chicken,' 'Watch your nails' when you shake the chicken in a brown paper
bag, and 'Have Cook prepare rest of meal while you touch up your makeup.'" 3
Again there was a big debate about whether it was funny or whether it was anti-
Semitic (as though these are necessarily oppositional). Again there was handwringing
about subject position, although I'm sure that's not what people imagined
they were doing. '"This is in worse taste (than the Friar's club debacle)
because she could get away with that because she is Black,' said one Litchfield
resident." 4
Let's sidestep for just a moment the complicating detail that Goldberg didn't
"get away with" much of anything at all precisely because she employed the body
of Danson as the time-honored comedic vehicle of racial minstrelsy—a white man
in blackface mouthing stereotypes too familiar to be ironic, albeit supposedly
written by a Black woman to parody herself. Rather I would like to examine the
comeback shot off by Goldberg's publicist: "Maybe (the critics) are not aware that
Whoopi is Jewish, so she is certainly not anti-Semitic." 5 It's a familiar litany: "I
heard a Jewish person tell this joke so it's not antisemitic." And of course, a
Jewish person wrote this joke for me, so I couldn't possibly be antisemitic just
because I'm trying to lighten things up with a little Holocaust humor. In fact,