I am aware that for the most part on this site when race and racism are mentioned one is asking for trouble. Oh well... I am going to speak truth to power. That's my way. You can stop reading now if any discussions about racism immediately make you defensive (fair warning).
Look I have been a fan of Bill Maher in the past so I don’t think that he is malicious. However I think that this clip from an interview on CNN last weekend deserves attention. In it, Maher is lamenting the ‘weak’ and ‘wimpy’ Barack Obama. He had hoped two years into the presidency of the first Black man elected to that office to be making jokes about Barack Obama being "gangsta." He expected more "Suge Knight" and less "Wayne Brady." I did not notice any diaries on KOS blasting Maher for these comments (perhaps there were and I just missed them).
I cannot express more emphatically how incredibly offensive and wrong this comparison to "Gangsters" and "Suge Knight" is. I want to express how racially offensive Maher’s comments are. I believe that his comments represent a strain of an argument that some people who consider themselves progressive have been making. And I want them to stop it and stop it now.
I am not going to bother to address the virulent anti-Obama racism on the right. Most recently Rush Limbaugh called Obama a juvenile delinquent.
This type of race baiting is endemic on the right in America. It doesn’t surprise me that Limbaugh would infantilize Barack Obama while associating him with criminality. The Right has made its bones by criminalizing people of color through enacting "tough on crime" measures and invoking "scary" black criminal bogeymen. One only needs to look at the Willie Horton ads that Papa Bush ran in the 80s to understand that this is the Right’s currency. Katheryn K Russell refers to this common belief among some whites in black criminality as the "myth of the criminalblackman."
I do want to address pointedly and honestly the race-baiting that I am seeing on my side of the political spectrum. Internalized racism is a terrible thing. We all suffer from it. It is so insidious that Black people will find ourselves clutching our own purses more tightly as we walk past young black men on the street. This is undeniable and it is real. The only way to overcome this conditioning is to actively seek to raise our consciousness and to be honest about how pervasive and insidious systemic racism really is. What I witnessed in Bill Maher’s comments was a different type of internalized racism and he should be called on it. I am certain that Maher would consider himself to be anti-racist and yet he has swallowed the same toxic racist sludge that the rest of us have. Racism is inescapable in America.
In fact, America did NOT elect Suge Knight as its president. I have absolutely no problem with the substance of the rest of Maher’s criticism of Barack Obama. He is free to characterize the President as weak, wussy, wimpy, whatever. I don’t care. But I draw the line as a black person at white people getting on national television and promulgating damaging and destructive stereotypes about blackness – equating us with thuggishness and gangsterism. This is supremely unhelpful and makes progressive multi-racial coalition building impossible.
I don’t know if Mr. Maher has any black friends but someone has to pull him aside and lovingly school him on this.
I think that Maher is emblematic of other white people who just don't understand the insidiousness of their own internalized racism and its attendant privilege.
Finally I am going to end with an Op-Ed from Ishmael Reed, one of my very favorite writers. It's called "What Progressives Don't Understand about Obama." Here is the salient part for me:
What the progressives forget is that black intellectuals have been called "paranoid," "bitter," "rowdy," "angry," "bullies," and accused of tirades and diatribes for more than 100 years. Very few of them would have been given a grade above D from most of my teachers.
When these progressives refer to themselves as Mr. Obama’s base, all they see is themselves. They ignore polls showing steadfast support for the president among blacks and Latinos. And now they are whispering about a primary challenge against the president. Brilliant! The kind of suicidal gesture that destroyed Jimmy Carter — and a way to lose the black vote forever.
Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all. They know how it feels to be unemployed and unable to buy your children Christmas presents. They know when not to shout. The president, the coolest man in the room, who worked among the unemployed in Chicago, knows too.
Update: It looks like only some heads are exploding today... Thanks for the comments and recommending the diary.
I co-sign Mr.Reed's truth-telling.