After living under the explicit racism of Apartheid South Africa, “The Daily Show”‘s Trevor Noah believes that America shifted away from the overt racism of years past and tried to rebrand racism as a less benign issue and not a generational disease.
On the Friday, Feb. 17 telecast of “The View,” the comedian, host and author suggested that America should treat racism like a disease passed down from parents to children in the same vein as alcoholism.
“If you look at an alcoholic, you have a problem. We can help treat you … I think it is the same for racism. Racism is hereditary. It’s passed down. You teach it to your children,” Noah tells the co-hosts. “It grows generation to generation. If we treat it like a disease, we wouldn’t shun people … Do you want them to change, or do you want to maintain the higher ground?”
Noah called himself “lucky” to experience the overt racism of Apartheid South Africa because it was “racism in its most blatant form.”
In the Nixon years, the United States avoided using racially charge words and phrases of yesteryear, Noah said. Instead of saying the n-word, the terms “low-income,” “welfare queens” and “moochers” were applied to poor Black people living in inner cities.
“America has a branding problem,” Noah proclaims. “Republicans are really good at branding things a certain way. ‘It’s not the Affordable Care Act, it’s Obama Care… If you call it Obama Care, then there are some people who are gonna be like ‘I don’t want that.'”
Ultimately, racists can not be put into a corner and left to their own devices, they must be treated like alcoholics or anyone else suffering from a disease.
