Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [111]
All that said, let’s get back to Stephen Colbert. Stephen, it seems right to say, wants a black friend to pad his anti-racist credentials, to show that he’s part of the community. No one with a black friend could really be racist, right? That’s the point of him putting up the picture of him with his black friend.
But then what are we to say about the fact that Stephen no longer has a black friend? (He ended it with Alan, after all.) If his linguistic license to offend were based on that he’d be out of luck. But Stephen is savvy enough to recognize that it isn’t really the having of the black friend that matters. It’s that he be seen by others to have only good intentions in talking about racially sensitive issues. Now, if a white person is truly open to having a black friend but does not have a black friend—perhaps because her circle of acquaintances is limited to an undiversified workplace—this might not even be enough to provide her linguistic license enough to ask for Kennedy’s book (Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word) by name at a Barnes and Noble. She simply wouldn’t get a chance to prove her good intentions within the confines of whatever limited relationships she has with the employees and other customers when she went to buy the book. However Stephen’s thought seems to be that no one could fault him if were to make it absolutely clear (through the holding of a well-publicized national search, no less!) that he wanted a black friend. For all his ignorance and insensitivity in other areas, Stephen knows that good intentions matter when it comes to race relations in America today.
Claiming Rights, Shirking Responsibilities
Now that we’ve tried to say in more detail why Stephen would want to both be colorblind (in his own impossible manner) and yet actively search for a black friend, let’s get back to the question of what this tension means.
As I see it, Stephen is trying to game the system by claiming rights of linguistic license while at the same time shirking the responsibilities that come with such rights. Stephen takes himself to have the right to say potentially offensive things on the basis of a linguistic license he earns by actively seeking a black friend. But he dodges all calls to act responsibly when it comes to issues of race to the extent that he claims to be colorblind. Let me explain.
What do we mean when we talk about rights and responsibilities in the context of race relations in America? We’ve already talked about rights in the context of linguistic license, so that should be easy to state. The rights in question here concern the ability to tackle racially charged issues and risk saying racially insensitive things in the process. As we saw, such rights are sometimes conferred on one’s community memberships. To someone like Chris Rock, only another African-American can utter the N-word, no matter how many black friends he or she has. A more liberal position has it that community involvement through one’s friendships is enough to license certain kinds of talk. If Stephen in fact does have linguistic license to risk saying racially insensitive things, it doesn’t seem that his right to do so is based on either of these things. Stephen is clearly not African-American (even if he doesn’t see race) and he wouldn’t be searching for a black friend if he already had one. To Stephen’s way of thinking, at least, his linguistic license to tackle racially charged subjects is issued on the basis of his mere wanting a black friend. He publicizes