calling the kettle black

"The right is cynically exploiting race"

Almost too rich for words, but let me try.

In the documentary about  Amos & Andy [What's the Fuss?] I posted yesterday, comedian George Kirby asks several Blacks  in Manhattan. "What do you think of when you hear Amos 'n Andy?"  Most, who appeared old enough to have actually watched it, remembered it fondly.  Of the two dissenters, one said "calling someone Amos & Andy was a put down;" the apparently youngest said it played to stereotypes.  Kirby next noted that while the radio show's white actors -  Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll -  had stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, television's Black actors had none.  My immediate thought was -- WTF?  Can you imagine the furor if Hollywood attempted to give  Alvin Childress   (Andy),  Spencer Williams ( Kingfish),  Tim Moore (Amos) or Ernestine Wade (Sapphire Stevens ) Stars?  Kirby himslef would have been among those expressing outrage., I guarantee it.  Anyway, I'm reminded of that most recent example of  tortured Black logic by a Leonard Pitts Jr. column. His  journalistic bread and butter is finding racial over-and-undertones in anything.  Here's the lede from "The right is cynically exploiting race"  “ You are such a racist nigger."- reader e-mail To answer your questions: Yes, the e-mail is quoted in its entirety. Yes, it's authentic; I received it a year or so ago. And, no, it is not unique in its sentiment, its coarseness or its deafness to irony. That note has always struck me as a stark benchmark of our slide into racial incoherence. ”   So, a single e-mail, which use of "nigger" would by my experience suggest a Black writer, is "a stark benchmark of our slide into racial incoherence,?"  I'm underwhelmed.  Give me another example Lenny. “ Here's another: Last week on "FOX & Friends," Glenn Beck, the FOX News host, declared President Obama a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." Bare seconds later, Beck turned around and said, "I'm not saying he doesn't like white people..." Maybe we should blame his confusion on the stress of being discriminated against. Nobody knows the trouble he's seen. But seriously. Beck is just the latest conservative caught trying to manipulate race in a naked appeal to the resentments of the white underclass. It's a breathtakingly cynical campaign that has gathered steam in recent years. ”   Like George Kirby, and so many other Black observers, Pitts Jr. is so hidebound by his own racial prejudice that,   with auto immune disease-like efficiency, he destroys himself with his own logic. Did Pitts, Jr. read  Dreams of My Father?   Is Pitts Jr. the only man alive who could answer "name a single Obama achievement that  recommends him to the presidency, other than being (nominally) Black?  The problem with Pitts's ilk is the same one Democrats have in the age of talk radio and the internet.  Having never been challenged before to debate on merit, they're ill equipped to deal with it, so they hurry to name calling. Here's the only thing this guy says that I can endorse. “ Because what matters here is ... the insult to our collective intelligence - and our collective hopes. One of which is that we will all someday evolve the courage, the compassion and the intercultural trust to face the hard truths of race head on, and thereby validate that self-evident truth upon which the country was founded. ”