ROY EDROSO

In January Jonah Goldberg, whose smirking countenance tops a regular column at the National Review Online, celebrated Martin Luther King Day by declaring, in "Arguments of Color," that he found it "so depressing that 'people of color' has replaced 'colored people.' In a very important sense, the old phrase was better - even if it represented something worse." His "important sense" turned out to be a semantic bagatelle ("Hot water means, I think, the same thing as water of hotness"), but he seemed to have a lot of fun with it.

In February Goldberg celebrated Black History by reposting an old column called "Black History Month: Why?", in which he anecdotally anguished over the preponderance of Black History courses versus, well, the other kind at Brown University. "And yeah, yeah," he did admit, "Brown may not be representative," before getting a few yuks out of funny-sounding phrases from black academe like, "a critical race theorist (sorry, I don't know if I'm supposed to capitalize that; I think capitalized letters are tools of the pale penis people)."

In a recent posting to NRO's blog, The Corner, Goldberg fondly recalled a lark he and his friends once shared: "When Marion Barry was re-elected Mayor of Washington DC -- largely by rallying his most loyal constituency, the 'ex-offender community' -- my friends and I were at a bar. Convinced that Western Civilization was at an end, we decided to come up with a drink to commemorate Barry's victory. Mixing the most potent ebony elixirs we could -- equal parts bourbon, Jagermaister, Kaluha and Coke (Coca Cola, that is) -- we came up with the Marion Barry and the appropriate tag line: 'So black not even The Man can keep it down!'"

Goldberg brings up black folks a lot, to humorous effect, in the familiar manner of many a young man sufficiently comfortable with his own anti-racist credentials to comfortably crack wise regarding his more melanin-enriched brethren. This interpretation is charitable, but not unlikely. In this era of self-congratulatory political incorrectness, who wouldn't rather be perceived as racially risque than as an uptight liberal stick in the mud? It's not like he said anything really racist.

Still, one is struck by this "Editor's Note" appended to Goldberg's recent column:

"In my last column I used words like 'monkey' and 'simian' in association with the students who applauded Alec Baldwin at Florida A&M. I did not know or realize that FAMU, as it is called, was a traditionally black college...I regret any offense along those lines I may have inadvertently caused. I've only gotten one complaint from someone who thought I was trying to be cleverly bigoted. I stand by that column, which I am quite fond of. But, I wouldn't want people to infer something I did not imply."

Even among the most well-meaning, accidents will happen. Assuming, charitably, that it was an accident.