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E-mail's harsh glare Saturday, Dec 1, 2007 By John Brummett Perhaps we should try to draw something constructive from what the poor man wrote. So let's cover three items regarding the recent unpleasantness from state Sen. Denny Altes, Republican of Fort Smith. First, it would serve us well to understand that e-mail, though a technological sibling of a private telephonic conversation, provides an opportunity for socially acceptable eavesdropping, even public windows into darkened souls. If you said the same thing into a telephone that you typed by e-mail, and if someone accused you of saying it, you could always deny or soft-pedal or mitigate it, absent a recording. But e-mails are documents. They provide stark evidence of themselves. They can be retrieved. They can be forwarded. They can be printed. Here, then, are two mouse clicks to remember: "Save as a draft," by which you put an e-mail in safekeeping for a cooling-off period, and, better still, "delete,"" by which you stomp the sucker flat. Altes, alas, didn't delete. His e-mail to a former Fort Smith mayor related certain distressing thoughts about illegal immigrants and blacks. The senator, widely deemed one of the more odd and ineffective conservative extremists in the General Assembly, wrote that he wished we could send all the illegal immigrants home. He said these illegal immigrants were getting like the blacks after the Revolutionary War. Now, he wrote, we're getting "overrun" by illegal immigrants and "outpopulated by the blacks also." Here's the second point: Maybe we could resist the too-easy opportunity to call Altes a racist. Racism is hate on account of skin color - and, vitally, one more thing. By the definition provided in one of the several race seminars I attended, racism must encompass the power to do official harm to those hated. Without power, racial bigotry is simply a personal problem. Altes is, we can be grateful, mostly powerless. The problems he raises are mostly his own. He never gets much if anything done in the Senate. His only excuse for power stems from his allowing himself to be a pawn of that so-called Brotherhood by which Sen. Bob Johnson of Bigelow runs the chamber. Any anti-immigrant legislation emanating from the Arkansas General Assembly will be in spite of, not because of, Altes. And, while the senator's written remarks clearly reflect breath-taking bigotry, it is worth remembering that not everyone conveys their heart accurately through their use of the written word. One can mistype just as one can misspeak. It could be that Altes is simply so spectacularly ignorant on such matters as to have no awareness, much less sensitivity, to the dreadfulness he was expressing. He said tearfully that he was sorry and wasn't a racist. So let us be generous and forgive what he said. Let us not judge what he is or might be. The League of United Latin American Citizens wants Altes to resign from office. But that's not the answer. Democracy permits what democracy permits. Voters are responsible for whom they elect. The answer is not to punish the man, but to educate him and others in the stupidity and disgrace of his words. That brings us to the third matter: While we should spare the offending senator any firm personal moral judgments, we should at the same time consider that this e-mail suggests more broadly that, yes, there might be underlying race factors in some of our anti-immigrant rhetoric. You think? Altes was writing disapprovingly about Hispanic immigrants. That just so happened to remind him of black people. In both cases, he wrote in an alienated way about people who don't look like him. If we had the same number of illegal immigrants as we have now, and if they were people not immediately discernible by appearance as different from the majority, do you think we would be enduring quite such resentment? Would an abundance of brunette white women from central or eastern Europe working in hotel housekeeping cause a similar political stir? If we'll all think introspectively, seriously and honestly on these things, maybe something more productive than Altes' personal humiliation can come from the harsh glare of his e-mail. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
