Kieran Healy

My thoughts exactly

Kevin Drum is exactly right about this piece of crap from David Skinner. Kevin’s post reminded me of this Keith Knight cartoon which makes the same point about reaction to Halle Berry and Denzel Washington at the Oscars.

Q: why do people make such a big deal about race?

It’s a terrible sentence, but not in the way Kevin Keegan and David Skinner claim. Keegan’s complaint about “her” not referring to the possessive “Toni Morrison’s” is the sort of prescriptive grammatical nit-picking that gives grammar a bad name. Skinner’s claim that the sentence means that writing about racial injustice makes you a genius is a clear misinterpretation: it says that Morrison’s genius makes it possible for her to create novels about racial injustice. What’s terrible about the sentence is that clunky “enables.” Keegan’s students apparently are learning to follow arcane, disputed rules but not to avoid vague, weak usage, and Skinner’s readers are apparently learning that he doesn’t know much about syntax, modern literature or racism.