Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza has provoked outrage with a profoundly tasteless, insensitive Twitter joke that tries to make light of the death of Trayvon Martin by linking him to President Obama.
This is what the conservative commentator tweeted yesterday: “I am thankful this week when I remember that America is big enough and great enough to survive Grown-Up Trayvon in the White House!”
Though D’Souza has since deleted the incredibly offensive tweet, the reaction has been quick and severe. D’Souza’s racist attacks on Obama in the past have been legendary, such as his description of Obama’s foreign policy philosophy as “Kenyan anti-colonialism.”
Of course, the basis of D’Souza’s tweet was Obama’s reaction to the death of Trayvon Martin, when he famously said, “When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is, Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
This is how liberal writer Adam Serwer dissected D’Souza’s racism on MSNBC:
“The joke has three premises, the first being that America wouldn’t be burdened with Obama if someone had shot and killed him when he was a teenager, and the second is that dead Black kids are hilarious.
“Yet the joke proves a little too much, because the third premise of the joke is that Black males are essentially interchangeable. And that implicitly acknowledges the president’s point in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict, that Black people, regardless of class or status, can be subject to racial profiling. In its own sick way, it also acknowledges the unlimited potential of a person whose life was cut short before they really had a chance to live it.
“There’s probably not a lot that supporters and opponents of Barack Obama can agree on, but not turning a dead teenager into the punchline of a joke is the sort of basic human decency anyone can aspire to. It appears to be beyond D’Souza.”
Then there were the reactions on Twitter, such as this one from @dankmtl:
“i’m thankful that you got caught cheating on your wife and had to resign from your job in disgrace and lost all credibility”
D’Souza, a former policy analyst under President Ronald Reagan and co-director of the 2012 film, “2016: Obama’s America,” which was based on his own book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” resigned from the presidency of The King’s College, an evangelical Christian liberal arts school based in Manhattan, because of a scandal. D’Souza reportedly attended an event on Christian values with a woman who was not his wife of 20 years and shared a hotel room with her. D’Souza, who had been president of the college since 2010, said he and his wife, Dixie, were “living in a state of separation for two years” and he did not share a hotel room with the woman, who had been introduced as his fiancee at the event.
“Obviously, I wouldn’t have introduced her as my fiancee if I thought we were doing anything improper,” D’Souza told the AP.
