By: Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Clint Eastwood has had it up to here with sensitivity.

“A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness,” he recently told the New York Times. “…The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so” … and here, he gave a make-my-day grimace … “sensitive.”

As it happens, Eastwood was talking about a fellow for whom sensitivity is not a problem: Walt Kowalski, the retired Detroit autoworker he portrays in his latest film, “Gran Torino.” Kowalski is the unlikely hero of a tale of redemption and sacrifice … unlikely because he is a cantankerous cuss with a mouth full of bigotry and invective, a guy who has it in for the “dagos,” the “micks,” the “hillbillies” and, most pointedly, the “slopes” … i.e., the Hmong refugees, an influx of which has left his once white, working-class neighborhood unrecognizable.

In the years since he stopped acting opposite orangutans, Eastwood has become a fascinating filmmaker, willing like few others to confront the nettlesome gray areas of human existence. “Gran Torino” is a worthy addition to that canon but for all the nettlesome grays it illuminates, the most nettlesome might be one it suggests only obliquely: the notion that we are drowning in our own sensitivity.

Here in the United States of the Aggrieved, there is no malady, mark, mannerism, mindset or malformation too miscellaneous to have its own support group, along with a cadre of lobbyists and lawyers hyper-vigilant for any suggestion of mistreatment or actionable discrimination. Largely as a result, American English has become a morass of compound constructions and newly invented terminologies designed to leave no one out, give no one cause for offense. Sometimes you wonder if, in so radically revising the way we communicate, we have not compromised our ability to do so.

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A few years ago, I showed one of my college classes an episode of “All in the Family.” The students were offended. Nor were they persuaded by my protestations that the show was: (a) hilarious and; (b) a satire that condemned bigotry by making it ridiculous. They are children of a different era where you simply cannot say the things Archie Bunker did, even to ridicule them.

Sometimes, I think that’s progress. Sometimes, I call it something else entirely.

Archie Bunker and Walt Kowalski are icons of a white America that is fading away … meaning not simply one that was freer with ethnic insult, but one where it was possible, among friends, to speak those insults in good humor, with no malice intended or imputed.

Indeed, Kowalski gets as good as he gives from his barber, an Italian, each slurring the other’s ancestry with good-natured brio. Yet when Kowalski confronts a group of black street punks, the script has him calling them “spooks” … not the more obvious epithet that rhymes with “trigger.” Eastwood doubtless knew using that word would have rendered the character irredeemable.

That the script allowed Eastwood to fire at will at his Italian friend but required him to pull up short in dealing with black thugs is telling. It speaks not simply to script dynamics, but to dynamics of American history and culture, to the question of who has assimilated enough that we deem them fair game and who has not.

It’s not difficult to appreciate the nostalgia Eastwood … and, likely, many white Americans of his generation … feel for the easy banter between Kowalski and his barber. It bespeaks a less touchy time where friendly insults helped pass the time of day.

But for there to be friendly insults, there must first be friendships, with all the reserves of trust and affection that term implies. The “sensitivity” Eastwood deplores is stark evidence that all too often, there is not.

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[Enlarge] About The Author: Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a nationally-syndicated columnist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He was originally hired by the Miami Herald to critique music, but within a few years he received his own column in which he dealt extensively with race, politics, and culture. He lives in Bowie, Maryland. He has won awards for his writing from the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and was first nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, eventually claiming the honor in 2004. He is also the author of the bestselling book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. Pitts gained national recognition for his widely-circulated column of September 12, 2001, “We’ll Go Forward From This Moment,” in which he described the toughness of the American spirit even in the face of such a horrible attack. In June 2007, Pitts was the subject of a campaign of death threats and harassment by neo-Nazis angry at a column he wrote about two whites raped and murdered in Knoxville, Tennessee. In his column addressing the murders, Pitts stated “for the crackpots, incendiaries and flat-out racists who have chosen this tragedy upon which to take an obscene and ludicrous stand. I have four words for them and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized. Cry me a river.” More death threats were made in April 2008 before his appearance at the University of Puget Sound. ——————————————————————————— | Read More About Leonard Pitts Jr. | Visit his website at www.leonardpittsjr.com.