#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.