Source: Bigstock

Takimag recently reported on a Bronx-based so-called “Racial Justice Center” that released a handy guide for how to racially ruin Christmas by going around asking intentionally stupid questions like “Why Is Santa Claus Always White?” Naturally, the center in question did not provide the obvious answer: “Because He’s a White Man.”

It can be a dangerous question to ask, though. Back in 2013, students at Indiana University drew festive flak after running a yuletide “Racial Justice” session of their own, creating a wall display, “CAN SANTA CLAUS BE A BLACK MAN?”

Alongside a “stereotypical” image of a black Santa playing a saxophone (not the first stereotype about black people that comes to mind, personally…) were a number of Christmas stockings asking pertinent questions like “If Santa Claus is a black man, wouldn’t all the presents be stolen?” and “If Santa Claus is a black man, would you let him come down your chimney?” Given certain controversial modern-day black-on-white crime patterns across the United States, he might force you to.

A Brown Charlie Christmas
By 2019, the true question had become not “Can Santa Be Black?” but “Can Santa Be White?” A panel discussion about “Decolonizing Pop Culture” at the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle featured a contribution from a black educator named James Miles, who told his audience as follows: “When I go to a mall and I see [a normal] Santa Claus, I say, ‘Hey, cool, look, there’s a white Santa Claus.’ If there’s a black Santa Claus, I just say, ‘Hey, there’s Santa Claus.’” Onlookers often challenge him on this, telling Miles that Santa is white. “No,” Miles then replies, espying a Valuable Opportunity For Public Education. “Santa Claus is whatever I say Santa Claus is.”

At least Miles deigns to recognize Santa as still being a humanoid. A bizarre escapade in 2013 saw an essay published on Slate.com by a coal-black soul named Aisha Harris, who complained that “a melanin-deficient Santa remains the default,” something that had alienated her from the figure since childhood. She proposed a new Christmas movie in which Santa magically race-shifted to match the skin color of every family whose home he entered—Robert De Niro would play white Santa, Eddie Murphy black Santa, and Jackie Chan yellow Santa. No Jewish Santa, of course; too much of an inherited ancestral aversion to chimneys.

Alternatively, “making Santa Claus an animal rather than an old white male could spare millions of non-white kids the insecurity and shame that I remember from childhood,” suggested Harris. Why not have a simultaneously white and black non–homo sapiens Santa called Penguin Claus?

“Being a penguin, Santa Claus can still reside in a snowy homeland—though for scientific accuracy we’ll need to move him from the North Pole to the South,” Harris further clarified. So great was Harris’ own commitment toward “scientific accuracy” that the currently published version of the article features the classic postscript correction that, in its initial publication, its author “originally identified penguins as mammals. They are birds.”

This essay produced a subsequent sudden bloody outburst from then Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who objected to such blatant attempts to skew the “historical” racial record of key festive figures. “Jesus was a white man too,” she said. Only when played by Robert Powell. “[Jesus is] a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa,” Kelly added, so as not to disillusion any watching toddlers, and each “historical figure” was definitely white. Not to everyone these days.

Absent Father Christmas
In 2020, a black Arkansas man named Chris Kennedy awoke appalled one bleak December morn to discover Father Christmas himself had left a “disturbing letter” of complaint in his mailbox after being disgusted by the sight of an eight-foot-tall inflatable Saint Nig outside Chris’ home.

“Please remove your negro Santa,” the “you’ve been naughty” note commanded. “You should not try to deceive children into believing that I am a negro. I am a Caucasian (white man to you) and have been for 600 years. You being jealous of my race is no excuse for your dishonesty.” The message concluded with Santa telling Kennedy’s family to move out of town “with the rest of your racist kind.”

Such plain statements of folkloric fact made Kennedy “extremely angry.” Making sure to address attendant media outlets whilst wearing a big T-shirt reading “BLACK FATHER” accompanied by a cartoon image of a trophy cup, as if black men somehow deserve a prize for looking after their own children, Kennedy refused to deflate his blow-up blackface doll.

Once news broke, final proof Kennedy lived in an evil, white supremacist neighborhood was provided by the fact that many of his white neighbors quickly and slavishly rallied round by running out and buying their own black Santas to pump up in their front yards too, in pure BLM-mandated solidarity. Remind me, who’s meant to be suffering endlessly in the position of severe racial oppression each Christmastime here again?

Insanity Claus
In 2016, Minnesota’s Mall of America decided to employ its first-ever black Santa to pander toward the formerly arch-Scandinavian state’s recently defiled demographics, in the shaded shape of a retired U.S. Army veteran named Larry Jefferson. He even grew a big beard for the occasion, rather than just strapping on a fake one—at least that particular part of his physiognomy was still white.

Speaking to the media, the admittedly highly avuncular-looking Larry was full of color-blind spiel about how “We want Santa to be for everyone, period,” as “kids don’t even notice” his race, and therefore “I’m still Santa, I just happen to be a Santa of color.” But if that’s really so, then why were the press making such a big thing about his chocolaty skin tone? If Santa’s race is a matter of absolutely zero importance, why not just leave him as being white, like he always has been?

So many white people made similar observations that the Mall of America had to temporarily close down their social media comments feed. “Santa is NOT black!! That is a nasty lie and a horrible thing to subject children to!” typed one. “I bet he climbs down chimneys and steals people’s presents,” said another, probably a recent graduate of Indiana University.

Another commenter called Larry’s hiring “an atrocity” as “blacks [ate] each other in Africa,” possibly even with sprouts for their Christmas dinner. A user named “Viper Duck” quacked out his rather extreme opinion that now that there was “nothing too sacred to muddy up” with negroid-ness, not even Santa Claus, only “Black genocide will fix the problem.” Don’t put that on your list to Santa, Viper, it could technically be considered a hate crime.

Even effete Japanese Star Trek actor George Takei got in on the act, tweeting out self-righteously that he was enjoying “Watching [white] people meltdown over a Black Santa in the Mall of America [screaming] “Santa is white!” Well, in our [WWII-era US] internment camp he was Asian. So there!”

What color was Santa in actual Imperial Japanese WWII-era internment camps, when he was busy handing out enslaved white inmates a single extra grain of rice in their Christmas Day rations, I wonder? As yellow as pissed-on snow.

Bing Crosby or Bill Cosby?
Black Santa dates back at least to the 1960s and ’70s, when U.S. black radical groups in places like Chicago held “Black Christmas” Kwanzaa-type parades in which a black Santa waved to kids in order to, as The Washington Post put it in BLM-crazy 2020, rally against “the specter of White Santa Claus…[who was] just another example of White cultural hegemony and the psychological harm inflicted upon Black people, and in particular Black children, in a society shaped by White social attitudes and expectations.”

Black children could not possibly experience any “psychological harm” from special 1960s Black Power Christmas card illustrations like this one depicting small negro kids killing a white “Pig Santa” coming down their chimney one December 24 by shooting, stabbing, and beating Porky to death with an actual dwarf Christmas tree, all accompanied by the very merry yuletide message “WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE [WHITE] CAPITALISTS OF OUR BLACK COMMUNITY.”

Nor could America’s impressionable black youth ever conceivably be groomed to grow up racially disturbed by being forced to attend events like the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s MLK-memorializing “Dr. King’s First Annual Black Xmas” parade held in Chicago in 1968. Here, local Afros were urged to “do their Christmas shopping with black businesses,” which is really just a polite way of avoiding openly saying “race-boycott all the thieving honkies, kikes, and slitty-eyes.”

Jackson denied the traditional term “White Christmas” had anything to do with snow at all. Jackson thought the song’s title was just a subliminal reference to the holiday secretly being a capitalism-led “white holy day set aside for whites” who “profit from it” by causing black customers to become “locked out of their mobility by being imprisoned with 11 months of debts” to pay for all their needlessly expensive presents. If that really is the case, then it implies Jackson patronizingly believes all blacks to be helpless infants with zero impulse control who shouldn’t be allowed any agency over their own bank accounts. Jackson’s son certainly shouldn’t, but that’s another matter.

The Reverend Jackson’s parade featured a candy-distributing black Santa dressed in a dashiki in the colors of the Ghanaian flag and a black glove in support of the Olympic “Black Power” Schwarze Heil saluters of earlier that same year. He was further carrying a sack bearing the Motown-style legend “Soul Power” and even a bunch of “love beads,” just to keep the local queer crowd happy, no doubt.

Rudolf the Brown-Hat Reindeer
Speaking of which, inevitably, there is now a gay black Santa available to corrupt little kids’ minds today too, in the shape of a 2017 children’s book, Santa’s Husband, by comedy writer (well, he pens material for Stephen Colbert, anyway) Daniel Kibblesmith. Here, Santa is a happy ho-ho-homo, married to a black male look-alike of himself who stands in for him at public events when he has to attend clinic for his latest dose of antiretrovirals.

The book started as a joke in response to the Mall of America controversy and Megyn Kelly’s open proclamation Santa was an Aryan just like Jesus, but then became real, published by no less than HarperCollins.

“We were very careful not to have anything offensive in the book,” Kibblesmith promised, following publication. “The only way you can find the book offensive is if you find the premise offensive.” I think that might be what you call a tautology.

If you saw any problem with a gay black Santa, added Kibblesmith, “we see [that] as maybe a problem with the reader,” not the book. Clearly, the true purpose of the text, besides introducing children into Queer Race Marxism, was just to troll white conservatives. Mission successful! My favorite outraged online response was as follows: “Two men fucking each other in the ass doesn’t make for a good Christmas story.” It might have improved Love Actually.

We shall continue this very theme next week, when we explore the sad, pink, chimney-pumping world of Queer Santa.