Issues of race have been in the news quite a lot recently, as the media have been closely following the George Zimmerman trial (Trayvon Martin), as well as the fallout from celebrity chef Paula Deen’s revelation that she used the n-word at some point in her past. One racial element that appears in both stories is the use of racial language (i.e., n-word, cracker) and questions about who, when, and how the use of these words determines the extent to which they are offensive.

Kathleen Parker, writing for the Washington Post, makes the case that there are differences among these words, and that the historical legacies of society and language must be taken into consideration when evaluating how offensive particular words may be. She says:

For those needing a refresher course, here are just a few reasons why cracker doesn’t compare to the N-word. Cracker has never been used routinely to:

●Deny a white person a seat at a lunch counter.
●Systematically deny whites the right to vote.
●Deny a white person a seat near the front of a bus.
●Crack the skulls of peaceful white protesters marching for equality.
●Blow up a church and kill four little white girls.

Need more? Didn’t think so.

Cracker may be a pejorative in some circles. It may even be used to insult a white person. But it clearly lacks the grievous, historical freight of the other.

The point that Ms. Parker is making has to do with power and the way that power is unequally distributed in society. It is this power, as Beverly Tatum so eloquently noted, that differentiates among:

• Individual racial prejudice, whereby individuals harbor biased attitudes towards others based on their membership in a particular racial or ethnic groups
• Discrimination, whereby individuals or institutions engage in biased behavior towards others based on their membership in a particular racial or ethnic groups
• Racism, whereby individuals or institutions benefit from society’s inequities based on race and ethnicity and use these benefits and power to maintain these inequities in society

Thus, although there is always a lot of anguished soul-searching about whether someone is racist based upon one comment, more useful questions might be whether this person was prejudiced or discriminatory. Tatum makes the provocative claim that everyone who benefits from society’s racial inequities is therefore racist, and so  it is not really that useful to try to focus on particular individuals. Rather, we should be focusing on the institutions and society.