When It Comes to Racism, Is Contrition Enough?

Can racist remarks spring only from racist lips?

The question has reared its head in recent weeks after the disclosure of unfortunate comments by high-profile people who claimed afterward that they didn’t mean what they said.

Last month, a white weather caster in Detroit compared black men to gorillas in ad-libbed banter between segments during an evening newscast.

The station, WDIV-TV, had just run a preview for an upcoming series on eligible bachelors, during which a black woman said she liked men who were “chocolate-skinned.” The next news segment featured a birthday party for a zoo gorilla.

Afterward, 27-year-old Michelle Leigh, stretching for a segue, asked the two anchors whether the gorilla qualified as “chocolate skinned.”

There was a stunned silence, then the anchors signed off.

Station management canned Leigh the next day.

The day after that, a New Jersey newspaper reported comments made by the white president of Rutgers University to faculty last November. In a discussion about whether too much weight is given to standardized tests in school admissions, Francis Lawrence blundered.

“The average SATs for African Americans is 750,” Lawrence said. “Do we set standards in the future so that we don’t admit anybody with the national test? Or do we deal with a disadvantaged population that doesn’t have that genetic, hereditary background to have a higher average?”

Genetic, hereditary background?

“What I intended to say was that standardized tests should not be used to exclude disadvantaged students on the trumped-up grounds that such tests measure inherent ability, because I believe that they do not,” said Lawrence after his remarks hit the news. By all accounts, Lawrence did say the opposite of what he stands for.

Students, however, unfamiliar with his record, reacted viscerally, marching on Lawrence’s office, demanding his resignation. On Feb. 7, a school basketball game was canceled after about 150 students staged a sit-in, calling for his job.

The embattled president has not been fired; on the contrary, although the school’s board of governors condemned his words last week, they also reaffirmed their support, citing Lawrence’s dedication to increasing minority enrollment both at Rutgers and at his previous campus, Tulane University in New Orleans.

One of Lawrence’s supporters, Mary Edna Davidson, dean of the School of Social Work at Rutgers and longtime civil rights activist, told me she cannot ignore Lawrence’s decades of commitment to minorities.

“I am African American,” she said, “and he recruited me here. The students don’t know the president, so when they hear what he said, they feel it’s a betrayal. They thought civil rights were won a generation ago. They put this in the context of the larger society and the erosion in affirmative action and cuts in student aid, and they think, ‘We can’t believe this is happening to us.’ ”

It is easy to imagine that Lawrence, who has apologized repeatedly, is feeling the very same emotion.

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For some, these incidents confirm suspicions about the closet hatreds of the majority. Others bemoan hardhearted responses to remediable human frailties.

How should we respond to these kinds of remarks?

Should we endorse as a matter of course the corporate equivalent of capital punishment--firing--when people in high-profile jobs say hurtful things?

Should we take at face value the mortification and contrition of the offenders and let them off with warnings, requiring sensitivity training?

Should we look at their records, their public passions and put their offending remarks into context? Is a context meaningful?

At the tumultuous Rutgers board of governors meeting, to the jeers of many students, Davidson said: “I’m not going to allow the lynching of Fran Lawrence.”

When I asked her about Michelle Leigh’s remarks on Detroit TV, however, she fairly sputtered.

“That is a totally different issue. That is a damn stereotype. Give me a break! Lawrence was arguing for the admission of black students into the great universities of America. What she was doing was ridiculing and feeding into racist myths.”

I have to agree.

It is possible to say something racist without being racist.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be wounds.

Nor does it mean there won’t be scars.