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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"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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