Race, Empathy, and Carolyn Maloney's N-Bomb

On the night Barack Obama was elected president, the host of the BBC show I was doing asked me if race was thus – poof! -- no longer an issue in America. (Answer: Um, no. Thought bubble: Guess that British accent only makes you sound 30 percent smarter.) So today do we see that one of Harvard's best-known scholars, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested after forcing his way into . . . his own home? (Huh? Yes, and did I mention he's black? Ohhhh, now you get it.) In other news, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) has apologized for uttering the n-word while excitedly repeating a story that she apparently imagined would make her political rival, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (also D-N.Y.), look bad; where to begin? Here, I guess: The sickness of racism is not so exotic, is it, causing spasms still from Cambridge to the Upper East Side.

Though I recently took Emily Bazelon to task for automatically assigning the most benign possible explanation to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's shocking quote about how she had assumed Roe v. Wade would reduce those "populations that we don't want to have too many of,'' I have to admit that my first reaction to Maloney's slur was, "Oh, dear. (Beat.) Only, this is Carolyn Maloney we're talking about." Carolyn Maloney, who, because I know and like her, could not possibly have meant . . .

In a world where everyone is so eager to assume the worst, are those times when we do just the opposite really so bad? Yes, actually, inasmuch as both are based on judgments of intent, which we can't ever really know, versus words and actions, which we can -- and yet for partisan or personal reasons often prefer to ignore.

Does that mean I think this incident reveals Maloney's inner hater? No, though I am reminded of the time I cursed in front of my mother and she said hmm, the way that fell out of your mouth, you'd almost think you'd said it before.

And whether that's the case with Maloney and her N-bomb, the way she forgot herself in her eagerness to tar her opponent without question reveals something true, something ugly, something that by any measure qualifies as "news we can use."