Our post Demeaning Blacks elicited a number of questions about what, exactly, my point was. Did I think it inappropriate to compliment blacks, some wondered. Am I so PC that I think that anything a white person says to a black person is automatically suspicious?
Well, no, but I do think that there are assumptions buried in much of what we say about matters of race, and some of those assumptions would surprise us if we were aware of them. I think they would especially surprise liberals since these folk often make a special effort to demonstrate that they are certainly not racist, even if those rednecks for whom they have such disdain are.
The basic purpose of our original post was to observe that when someone says about a black man that he's "articulate," the tacit meaning of the statement is that "he's articulate for a black man." This is a compliment to the individual, I suppose, but in my view it's an insult to blacks in general. The assumption on the part of the speaker is that it's not the norm to find a black man who can speak properly. The fact that one rarely hears whites described this way is evidence that articulateness is taken for granted among whites but not among blacks and that the speaker is mildly surprised to encounter a black man who expresses himself in standard English.
When I was growing up I used to hear people say about some handsome celebrity that he's "a good-looking black man." They didn't say that he's a good-looking man but that he's a good-looking black man. What they were actually asserting, without realizing it, probably, was that the celebrity was good-looking for a black man, as if black attractiveness is to be measured on a different, and doubtless more relaxed, scale than that of whites.
I thought this was insulting to blacks then, and I think the "articulate" compliment is, for the same reason, insulting now - not to the individual, of course, but to African-Americans in general.
The funny thing is that neither the person who insults by voicing the compliment nor the person who is complimented usually realizes what's really being said and what assumptions give rise to it.
Perhaps it would be interesting when we hear someone say that so and so is "articulate" to ask them if that surprises them. The question might help to expose the unfortunate assumptions that underlie their observation.
RLC