Something Happening Here

"We go over to John's office, and he says, 'I'm fasting,'" Fish told me, laughing as he related the rest:

"Here's this little, blond, Turtle Creek kind of Dallas attorney, who's really a nice person," he said. "John says, 'Look, when I'm fasting, the first thing I do is drink a quart of olive oil in the morning.' He goes on and on about what this olive oil does to him."

The olive oil, apparently, exerted a powerful laxative effect, which Price described in some detail. You get it, right? Price was not pleased with the appearance of an emissary in the place of the man with whom he was supposed to be negotiating. Obviously his intention was to run off the emissary without having to admit explicitly that he was running her off.

"Did it work?" I asked.

"It did," Fish said with a rueful laugh. "It did."

If Price can get one over on you, he's going to get one over on you. If his talking about elimination is going to destroy your composure, prepare to be decomposed.

I'm not offering this as a blanket excuse for everything that comes out of his mouth. Right after the black hole moment at the commissioner's court meeting, Price stood on the steps outside and offered these remarks:

"If I'm bartering with you, Saul, I'm OK. I'm OK. But if I try to 'Jew you down,' oh, is that racist? I thought it meant the same thing. Oh, maybe it doesn't."

We could get really complicated with this. For one thing when I listened to the clip, I thought he pronounced the name as sah-ool, the Spanish pronunciation, not sahl, which would have been the preferred pronunciation in your standard anti-Semitic remark.

So was this about black people talking to Mexican-American people about Jewish people?

Nah. Let's not make it that complicated. "Jew you down" is not complicated. It's anti-Semitic. There isn't a debate about that. Tossing that expression into the pot at a moment like this only served to evoke a long, ugly history of anti-Semitism in the black community in Dallas.

But it's also a mistake to try to read somebody's mind—white or black—from a single remark. My two-bit take on things is this: 20 years ago white people were divided by a line—avowed racists on one side, liberals on the other.

As the Obamaphenom unfolds, I get a different picture: The big middle of white society is sort of wishy-washy liberal, wishy-washy racist, and it doesn't take much of a poke to push us one way or the other.

Meanwhile we still bring personal histories to the table. Last week I met with Tom Dunning, former chairman of the Dallas Citizens Council, a private community leadership group, who was not happy with me over remarks I had made about his group's use of the term, negro, to describe black people in a recently published history of the Citizens Council.

I wrote an item last week for our blog, Unfair Park, in which I said I thought it was remarkable that the Citizens Council, in a published document no less, would use that word—not in quotes but as its own contemporary term—in the year 2008.

Dunning, a lifelong Democrat, said to me: "I think there's probably more important things to criticize."

OK. I see that. But "negro?" In the Year of Our Lord 2008? Are you kidding me?

But Dunning is universally respected in the city for always having been on the right side of these issues. Should I have made a big deal about the word? Or is it just gotcha? I'm not sure anymore.

I think something is going on. Some period of years ago—15 or 20, maybe?— everything ethnic and racial went underground. White people in particular figured out that they could screw up their jobs by saying the wrong thing. A more diverse society promoted real growth in understanding.

People got more careful about what came out of their mouths. Now that is changing again. Some level of inhibition has lifted. People are poking on each other again. Jesse Jackson even does it to Obama.

Is it a good thing? A bad thing? I know this much. It's a thing. And we are in for one very interesting season ahead as this thing works its way through the body politic. Maybe what America really needs is a quart of olive oil.