July 29, 2013
Everyone, that is, except poor white Southern rednecks. There’s obviously no room at the lunch counter for them.
Black activist Jarrett Maupin II, a protégé of Al Sharpton who until recently sported one of those Sharptonesque Darth Vader hair helmets, filed a complaint about “Redneck Day” in late May to a Denver office of the US Department of Education. In 2009 Maupin pleaded guilty to a felony count of making a false statement to the FBI. Maupin has also on at least one occasion spoken before an assembly of the Spiritual Israel Church and Its Army, a “largely African American” (read: “pretty much entirely African American”) congregation that says prominent biblical figures from Adam all the way through Jesus were black.
In his letter to the Department of Education, Maupin claimed that Arizona’s blacks”all ten or so of them”were “outraged over the controversial celebration” and that all students of all hues were “negatively impacted by the racially-insensitive theme.”
On July 18, the DoE responded to Maupin with a letter:
We have determined that we have the authority to investigate this allegation…the scope of OCR’s investigation will be limited to whether a racially hostile environment was created due to language and actions that were not protected by the First Amendment.
Mind you, last year a federal judge said it would be constitutional for Arizona’s Hispanic students to sue the state for discontinuing “La Raza” studies that would by any objective measure be deemed intensely hostile and demeaning toward gringos.
But logical consistency has never intruded upon the increasingly insane Passion Play known as modern American race relations.
To me, the solution is simple. American blacks took the word “nigger” away from whites by “reclaiming” it, although technically it was never theirs in the first place. I suggest they do the same thing with the word “redneck” and the rebel flag.
And we, as Americans, should achieve this cultural breakthrough the best way we know how: through a television show. I believe Hollywood should resurrect the classic TV program The Dukes of Hazzard with an all-black cast. Rather than running moonshine, the boys should evade the local authorities by peddling, oh, I don”t know”crack cocaine? And they can “reclaim” the word “redneck” for themselves. They can even keep the rebel flag on their pimped-out ride. And to make everyone happy and ensure that not a soul gets offended, they can call the show The Spooks of Hazzard.
