Monday, March 31, 2014

#NotYourRacistJoke

Image credit Suey Park and Colleagues of the
#NotYourAsianSidekick social media campaign
This seemingly won't go away, and people keep asking about it. Most of the opinions I see, inevitably expressed as fact, are not coming from POC. They're also not listening to POC — they're too busy defending a celebrity, apparently in equal parts because he's a celebrity, and because he's perceived to be "on our side."

So, here's my take. Yes, it's a rant. What's your point? And let's be clear: I'm not interested in defenses of Colbert. If you really think I haven't heard them all before (and analyzed them all before, and dispensed with them appropriately), you're not paying attention.

Here's what I said on Facebook the other day:



Okay, so I keep getting asked about Colbert. Here's the deal: First off, the show's producers are complete idjits for ever thinking something like that could EVER be posted to the show's Twitter feed. Pro tip, dominant culture: It can't. 
Here's another pro tip for you, and this includes Colbert himself: As a white man, you cannot do this. If you had brought on a member of your show who is a POC to do that sketch — i.e., announcing the "new foundation," and using his or her own ethnic group as the foil, you might have been able to get away with it. But POC are done letting non-POC use certain terms, like snickering eight-year-olds laughing behind their hands at getting away with saying a dirty word, and then calling it "ironic" or "reclaiming." Here's the deal: *You* cannot use it ironically; it's not possible. And it's not, never has been, and never will be yours to reclaim. That's an impossibility, and it's time to face that simple fact. 
Also, Colbert, my own personal bone to pick with you: Thanks a fucking lot. You just undid months of coalition-building, potentially driving a HUGE wedge between our two ethnic groups. Suey Park has been the driving force helping NDNs design their own social media campaigns to fight back against that vicious racist Dan Snyder. And you and your staff just took bridges that you didn't build and you fucking dynamited them. 
So you'll understand if I don't defend your supposed "comedy," which, dominant-culture protestations to the contrary, is in no way sacred. And you'll understand if, with the benefit of a mostly-sleepless night in which I turned this over in my head and looked at it from all angles, I can see that you've done us all some real damage.

With benefit of another day to consider this, I'm actually angrier yet. Because it was something that, done right, could have made a very important point in a way that would actually have worked.

Here's how you do it.

First, take the words out of Colbert's mouth. As I said earlier, a white person cannot do this. Period. Doesn't matter the "intent"; it's racist. Period.

So, how do you get around it? Easily. The Colbert Report and The Daily Show have always made a point of hiring actors of color, and letting them make some fierce points about racism. So why wasn't that done here?

Note: What follows is a suggestion that's less about the who than the how. It could be any race or ethnic group, but the one that springs most readily to mind involves a famous [and powerful] Black person, so I'm using that as an example. [Obligatory troll prophylactic: Yes, I'm part Black. No, I'm not Black enough to "reclaim" words, etc. If I'm not, certainly no white person is.]

What they should have done is retain someone like Wyatt Cenac. Have him choose a role portraying some famous Black conservative who doesn't think racism is a real issue in the country anymore — Clarence Thomas comes to mind as the obvious choice, but there are others — and have him, in character, announce that he's creating a foundation for the benefit of poor benighted Black folk. Every Black person in the viewing audience will get the referent immediately, and they will understand how utterly inappropriate it is. Non-Black folks will, too.

Is it identical to Dan Snyder, white racist? Of course not. But it makes the point, without putting racist words in a white person's mouth.


With a little forethought — hell, with a little thought, which clearly didn't happen here — the show's producers could have put together something very effective. Instead, they went the easy route, for the quick cheap laughs based on racism. The went off half-cocked, and shot themselves in the foot.

Unfortunately, they also shot a lot of us POC in the collective foot at the same time, and we were nothing more than innocent bystanders.

And we are, all of us, #NotYourRacistJokes. 




Copyright Ajijakwe, 2014; all rights reserved.

2 comments :

  1. Right on, Nimisenh. Thanks for saying from a POC's perspective what I've been thinking but can't say anywhere nearly as effectively from a white person's perspective. There. Are. Things. We. Cannot. Say. Ever.

    There is a diary up today by a white person (he says he is) which follows up a comment that someone else made in another diary, and it's a true statement in both cases. People weren't laughing at the attempted skewering of racism. They were laughing at the racist name, caricature, and language Colbert was using. Racism is so ingrained in our culture that we are conditioned to think it is funny, even today, even after decades of consciousness raising efforts directed at white people specifically and the dominant culture as a whole by all sorts of peoples of color. And it's ingrained enough that even people of color were laughing at the racism. Not all POC by any means, but a sizable number, enough that there is pushback against the Cancel Colbert hashtag fight by quite a few Black people.

    At this point, and since just after the Super Bowl, the Indigenous groups fighting mascotry and the allies that are members of them are fighting alone. The next protest takes place tonight in Oakland on Major League Baseball's opening day, where the Oakland As are hosting the Cleveland #NotYourMascot s. Southern California's AIM is a part of this one. There are a number of leaders in EONM heading to Oakland for this. I'd love to be able to go and make my voice heard in support. When the Seattle Mariners host Cleveland in June, I will be protesting outside and may also try to get tickets in a good spot so I can bring in a sign. There are just over 500 members of EONM now. It's growing and it's completely NDN-led, as it should be, and majority NDN membership, though there are some allies here and there. What I think we need is a bunch of positive ongoing publicity outside of NDN press. Maybe MB would be willing to bring this to the front page of DK from time to time? I need to ask Jacqueline, Ethan, and Toby about this, and then ask him.

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