English literature and language studies

¶ … Hate Radio," Patricia J. Williams comments on the growing trend of "anything goes" talk radio, led by radio personalities who seem determined to anger as many people as possible, and who cater to an audience of people empowered to say almost anything, no matter how prejudiced or ill-informed about other groups of people.

She describes how she first became aware of this type of media broadcast. In 1991 she accidentally heard two radio personalities commenting about George W. Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Their view seemed to be that Bush deliberately nominated a poorly qualified Black American candidate knowing he wouldn't be confirmed. He could then place someone there "with intelligence," presumably a non-black. They made up a new pejorative label: "Blafricans," which eliminates the reference to the American entirely.

At first she thought this exchange was unusual, and she wrote the conversation down. As an isolated and overtly racist conversation on the public airwaves, she was sure the radio station would soon be inundated with protests.

She was shocked to see that there was no "firestorm of protest." Three years later, she sees "hate talk" on the radio as thriving and flourishing, with such "shock jocks" as Howard Stern, Tom Lykie and Morton Dowey, Jr. accepted as guests on mainstream television shows such as Jay Leno's "Tonight" show. She notes that this validates prejudicial attitudes and beliefs and has made it OK to say in public what used to be held privately and discreetly. She describes the callers as "grown people sitting around scaring themselves to death with fantasies of black feminist Mexican able-bodied gay soldiers earning $10,000 a year on welfare who are... criminally depraved." At first this reader wanted to believe she was exaggerating.

Williams is not naive about racism in the United States, and is concerned that what she hears on the radio simply says out loud what people have always felt. The attitudes may always have been there, but she notes that when not spoken publicly, were restrained to what Williams calls a "tolerable" level. She notes cycles in the United States, periods when we are more or less tolerant of differences among people. She believes the hate jockeys have made it OK to "verbally stone" any one or any idea different from their perceived norm.

Williams argues, however, that these hard-bitten polemicists aren't atypical or unusual. As a Black woman, in the eyes of both the radio personalities and their fans, she is "a suspect self, a moving target of loathsome properties, not merely different but dangerous."

Williams heard the first broadcast by accident, intending to listen to something else. This may be why it is easy for those people who don't seek such shows out to diminish their potential impact on society. She sees these shows as polarizing society. Perhaps she is right, although something in the reader wants to resist what she says. The reader wants to believe that Williams is exaggerating. Maybe the radio personalities caught her on an off day. Perhaps she'd just broken a nail or been told the roof had to be replaced, and was predestined to over-react -- just a little. Decent people want her to be over-reacting.

But Williams backs up her views with hard facts. She notes statistics that 50% of the country believes that Latinos and Blacks aren't as smart as white people, and that the majority believe that "blacks are lazy, violent, welfare-dependent, and unpatriotic."

She makes an important point: blind, unthinking prejudice recently turned some Eastern European countries into war-torn wastelands, with atrocities committed in the name of race or religion that we haven't seen since World War II.

The new talk radio has raised constitutional issues, such as how to resolve the question of when free speech collides with the right to privacy (Levendosky, 2001), but that issue seems arcane when words like "Nigger" and "Kike" can be heard on the radio by our children.