Sasheer Zamata

The Week’s Most Fallacious, Vexatious, and Ostentatious Headlines

THE NOBLE CAMPAIGN TO FIGHT (SPECIFIC FORMS OF) RACIAL STEREOTYPING
Who would have thought that you could take people of widely divergent racial and religious backgrounds, cram them together”€”often against their will“€”and that instead of rainbows and harp-playing and communal bubble baths, you’d wind up with an ever escalating level of cultural dissonance and finger-pointing insanity? Allow us to pause for a moment and shake our damn head”€”our collective damn head, that is.

This past week bore witness to fat Latinas upbraiding Saturday Night Live for not embracing fat Latinas, black rapper Nick Cannon donning whiteface, and loud calls for comedian Stephen Colbert’s white head after his handlers Tweeted something deemed insensitive to hypersensitive Asians.

Saturday Night Live was far better in the 1970s, when it had one token black guy who handled the Hispanic stereotypes. Recently the serially unfunny show capitulated to activists’ demands that they hire an unfunny black woman“€”which they did, and to up the ante (or the Aunt Jemima), they also hired a pair of unfunny black female writers.

Earlier this month the show faced a foul blast of bean-scented scorn when it featured an unfunny sketch depicting a stereotyped Venezuelan woman. Perhaps sensing a once-in-a-lifetime chance at fame, a pair of unfunny would-be Hispanic comediennes launched a Twitter campaign called #StillNoLatinas, publicly attempting to brownmail SNL producer Lorne Michaels into hiring yet more unfunny people of color. The Latin Post, noting that SNL has recently “made a strive [sic] toward diversity,” also wrote that one of the two careerist Latinas “struggled to find a Latina role model and instead settled on Chris Farley,” which is the only truly funny line in the entire debacle.

Nick Cannon, black rapper and host of America’s Got [sic] Talent, is promoting his new album White People Party Music by donning whiteface, affecting a dudebro vocal inflection, and depicting a character he calls “Connor Smallnut.” There was a mild backlash, which CNN’s mildly black Don Lemon pooh-poohed due to, you know, slavery ‘n’ stuff. This is America, where people should be treated equally, and we personally find nothing reprehensible about Cannon’s whiteface routine so long as a high-profile white musician is allowed to don blackface and play a character called “Tyrone Tinybrain.”

Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, who has made a career depicting a fictional right-wing news pundit that he calls an “idiot” and “willfully ignorant,” has learned the hard way that one can’t even make fun of so-called “racists” without being deemed a racist yourself. During an episode of The Colbert Report that satirized the owner of the Washington Redskins’ clumsy outreach efforts toward Injuns, Colbert uttered the following line, which his handlers subsequently Tweeted:

I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.

Eyes rolled in the egg-roll community, and yet another Twitter campaign, this one called #CancelColbert, was launched. Tireless social-justice Tweeters called the joke “disgusting,” demanded that Colbert apologize, and claimed without a shred of supporting evidence that “these ‘jokes’ once justified exclusionary acts, internment camps, atom bombs, napalm, and the murder of Vincent Chin.”

THE QUAINT NOTION THAT BLACK STUDENTS ARE OVER-DISCIPLINED
Professional apologists, deniers, and excuse-makers are flippin’ the frick out over a recently released U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights report on “School Discipline” in America’s fine public educational establishments. Among the report’s revelations:

Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students….Black children represent 18% of preschool enrollment, but 48% of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension….

The report engendered loud, belching calls to end “discrimination” against black children. What didn’t garner nearly as much publicity is the report’s finding that boys “represent 79% of preschool children suspended once and 82% of preschool children suspended multiple times,” because (ahem) it is assumed that boys are more prone to misbehaving. Also left unmentioned in the tidal-wave-sized ripples of indignation that followed in the report’s wake are obviously irrelevant topics such as black youths’ homicide rates and black illegitimacy rates.

Yet the outrage and cries of racism proceed unabated. In The Huffington Post, “author and political analyst” Earl Ofari Hutchinson asked, “What’s Next, Arrest in the Womb?” Well, yes”€”if a black fetus commits murder while still in the womb, it should be arrested and tried before an impartial jury of fetuses.