Attorney General Eric Holder
By Gus Renegade
Why White Racist Humor Is No Joke for Black People
Former Attorney General Eric Holder suggested we are “a nation of cowards,” unwilling to speak accurately about racism. Numerous whites claim that lack of cultural competence and anxiety about being unjustly indicted as racist justifies their silence. However, when Black people exit their presence… many fragile, mute white folks mutate into vociferous, white face versions of funnyman Redd Foxx.
Journalist and historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. writes that President Abraham Lincoln “loved n-gger jokes” and “pre-Amos and Andy stories about the doings of ‘shuffling’ Blacks.” Lincoln, dubbed “the great emancipator,” inferred that there was “something wrong with men who didn’t like a good ‘darky’ joke.”
Professor Kenneth O’Reilly documents that President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew shared a similar, pathological hankering for “darky” humor. The two orchestrated a minstrel show during a 1970 Gridiron Club dinner attended by a legion of elite white men who hooted and harmonized “Dixie.”
Perhaps that’s why it’s called The White House?
It’s been argued that racists’ power is waning and justice is allegedly on the horizon. Current events suggest this generation’s racists are supremely skilled in concealing their devotion to harming Black people. The recent hemorrhage of toxic emails and text messages offers a gruesome, unadulterated glimpse of resilient racist pathology. This unvarnished speech obliterates Ta-Nehisi Coates’ opinion that Whites “are often sincerely and greatly pained by racism.” They evidence a grotesque merriment with Black agony, a jovial commitment to global white terror.
Racist jokes are the luggage that transport and solidify values of white domination. Swedish sociologist and Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Myrdal concluded these jokes function as a “sounding board for and as a magnifier for” cherished rituals of mauling Black people. Texas A&M professor Joe Feagin confirms that anti-black humor permeates White culture. He co-authored Two-Faced Racism, which says, “Jokes allow [whites] to break social taboos, and thereby gain pleasure from expressing feelings and views that are normally repressed because of social pressures.” The book also suggests that racist humor “usually reveals hostile and deliberately hurtful sentiments,” invariably celebrating the molestation and denial of Black humanity.
Racism is ceaseless global war. Black people are to be mangled and subjugated by any means necessary. Everlasting literal and figurative denial of Black humanity is compulsory. Jennifer Eberhardt , 2014 MacArthur Foundation grant recipient, asserts that whites often associate apes with African-Americans unconsciously. South Carolina Republican activist Rusty DePass, former CEO of the Tennessee Hospitality Association Walt Baker, and former Ferguson court clerk Mary Ann Twitty all consciously, gleefully compared the Obama White House to Planet Of The Apes… in jest.
And they’ve all since apologized.
It is a gross miscalculation to reduce these behaviors to tacky tomfoolery from racially insensitive oafs who don’t know any better. Military science dictates that enemy combatants be continuously maligned. White killer, “American Sniper” Chris Kyle emphasized, “you have to distance yourself from your enemy to kill him.” Centuries of n-gger jokes have placed light years between Black lives and white empathy.
Whether through the use of chokeholds or punchlines, Black life must be smothered and ridiculed. The demented White duo who mocked the strangulation of Eric Garner during a December 2014 WPIX news broadcast demonstrates that Black death is sidesplitting comedy for racists.
In fact, this noxious anti-black slapstick has contaminated our
Chris Rock
own sense of humor. A sizable portion (if not the totality) of Black comedy is dedicated to Black deprecation. It’s no mystery why racists appreciate – and recite – Chris Rock’s gag about joining the Ku Klux Klan because of his hatred of “n-ggers.” Wendy Todd recognized this trend in the selection of South Africa’s Trevor Noah to take the reigns of The Daily Show. Todd observed that White audiences devour Noah’s routines that “often hinge on making fun of African-Americans.” Fear, miseducation and destruction of Black self-respect cause many of us to jeer ourselves for the entertainment of our oppressors.
Platoons of victimized Black people defended the character and racist hijinks of the Buffalo Bills’ Richie Incognito. In 2013 he was banished from the Miami Dolphins for terrorizing his non-white teammates and coworkers. No small number of Black NFL players announced their support of Incognito—some even decreed him an “honorary Black man.” Unfortunately, the investigation into Incognito’s activities revealed no honor. The investigation unearthed text messages where he and another white man snickered about battle rifles “perfect for shooting Black people.”
Deputy public defender Peter Santina admitted to not being “shocked at the revelation there is a white-power network within the [San Francisco] Police Department.” More than a dozen officers bonded while cackling about “burning crosses” and celebrating “Whitemas.” One suspected race soldier offered this recommendation if a Black person is invited to your residence: “Get your pocket gun. Keep it available in case the monkey returns to his roots. Its [sic] not against the law to put an animal down.”
The charred corpses of four Black girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing illustrate that “putting down” Black children is white supremacy culture. “Put down” like Trayvon Martin. Or “put down” the way former Coatesville, Pa. school superintendent Richard Como texted about the Black children he was hired to educate. Coates and another white educator were tickled pink at the prospect of changing all of their Black pupils’ surnames to n-gger. The former superintendent thought calling Black children “Joe n-gger, Bill n-gger, Snake n-gger got a nice ring to it.”
Serpents, baboons, n-ggers. Anything but a Black person worthy of life.
Even Black lives at the White House are unworthy. Tech conglomerate Google unwittingly corroborated the entirety of this report with their most recent apology to the White House. Millennial racists made “prank” submissions to Google Maps, so that one is directed to the White House when searching for “N-gger king,” or “n-gga house.”
This is Google’s “most recent” apology because they offered a similar mea culpa in 2009. At the time, the top “Google Images” result for a search of “Michelle Obama” revealed “a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.”
It’s called the White House for a reason.
