In Other News, Chris Rock Uses the N-Word

Under the eyeroll-inducing headline "Double Standard?" the WSJ Washington Wire reports:

Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden took a pounding recently for an interview in which he praised primary rival Barack Obama, an African-American, as "articulate," among other things. Critics argued that Biden's use of the term suggested that it was unusual for African-Americans to be articulate.

But over the holiday weekend, Biden got some company in that phrasing from an especially credible source on the subject of racial sensitivity: NAACP President Bruce Gordon. In an interview on CNN, Gordon criticized the news media for relying too heavily on former presidential candidates Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for assessments of the views of African-Americans.

Gordon ascribed that reliance to the fact that "Al and Jesse are bright, articulate, compelling personalities. They've both run for president, so they've created a presence for themselves, and the media gets lazy and simply picks them because they always have."

Short answer: No, it's not a double standard—although kudos for the attempt to pretend this isn't the equivalent of an ignorant-ass cracker whining, "Why can black people use the n-word but I can't?"

Longer answer: Though there quite certainly may have been critics who argued "that Biden's use of the term suggested that it was unusual for African-Americans to be articulate," most thinking people with a passing familiarity with history recognized that the use of "articulate" in the context constructed by Biden is generally a dog whistle intended to mean "white-sounding." That was the real rub. The understood definition of "articulate" in this milieu necessarily excludes "black-sounding" men like Jackson and Sharpton, even though they are inarguably articulate by its unloaded, straightforward definition.

When Gordon uses the term to refer to Jackson and Sharpton, he's undermining the dog whistle, restoring the word to its original meaning without the racial baggage. And for anyone who's incapable of wrapping his or her head around that distinction, then try this one instead: Words just don't always mean the same thing no matter who's saying them. If Dave Chappelle calls Mos Def one sick nigger, it's a compliment. If George Allen does it, not so much.