Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.
– The internet had a nice time pointing and laughing at white supremacist Craig Cobb, who recently found out that he is 14 percent black on the Trisha Goddard Show, which appears to be a British version of Oprah. No word on whether or not there is a segment on her show called “Trisha’s Favorite Things,” where she screams, “You get socialized medicine and nine days of sunlight a year! You get socialized medicine and nine days of sunlight a year! And you get socialized medicine and nine days of sunlight a year!” I guess there’s an American version of her show, but I’m usually too busy watching the Bethenny Frankel show to notice.
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“Sweetheart, you have a little black in you,” Goddard told Cobb in the segment. Instead of the obvious retort—”Well, would you like to have a little neo-Nazi in you?”—Cobb just insisted that her findings are “statistical noise.” He also rejected a fistbump from Goddard and ignored her when she called him “bro.”
I get what Trisha Goddard was trying to do: get ratings for her struggling program, which was the lowest-rated new daytime talk show last year. Very noble cause. As a side effect, Trisha Goddard has also just given Craig Cobb a new excuse to call people “n*ggers.” After all, he IS black. RACIST
– Strange but true: there’s a town in Arkansas with a history of racism. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Harrison, Arkansas, which was the headquaters for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s, has attempted to bury and forget its less-than-savory past, but they have to deal with their rather racist present first. A presumably fair-skinned citizen is paying $200 a month to display the above sign, to the anger of everyone who thinks that it is super fucked up and stupid—to the town’s credit, a lot of residents are protesting the sign. This guy—let’s just assume it’s a man for now—has decided to remain anonymous (who does he think he is, a YouTube commenter?), while saying in a statement that he’s just exercising his right to free speech.
“There is a double-standard in this country regarding differences of opinion. Those differences of opinion do not make a person racist. The First Amendment right to freedom of speech is for everyone. That is the point of the message.” Yeah! This is just, like, a simple disagreement about whether black people are subhuman monkeys who deserve to be sold like cattle.
He told the Harrison Daily Times (subscription required) that “the word, ‘racist’ is a loaded term, loaded against white people. It’s a public secret. Everyone knows it’s the truth, and yet, no one will talk about it.” Can we please stop calling this person racist just because he hates black people? I mean, really. This is getting out of hand. You’re gonna try to fool me again by saying former Alabama Governor Geoge Wallace was a racist, arent’t you? He had a difference of opinion on the subject of whether or not blacks and whites could be in the same room together. Quit making this complicated, America! RACIST
– Toni Jenkins, the Red Lobster waitress who claimed a customer wrote the N-word on their receipt and gave her no tip may have some explaining to do now that a couple of handwriting experts are saying that the racial slur could not have been written by the same person who wrote “none” on the tip line. Jenkins received $10,749 from an online fundraising organization called Tips for Toni, but the customer, 20-year-old Devin Barnes, denied he wrote the offending word on the receipt—and now, a handwriting analyst hired by Devin’s attorney and pastor is saying that the slur was written by somebody else. When reached by conservative website The Daily Caller, Toni acknowledged she didn’t know who wrote the offensive word, and said she would be open to sharing the money with Devin “if there was any left” (she bought a car and donated some to her church). If this ends up being a hoax, Jenkins has a responsibility to apologize to Barnes and give the money back. From the beginning, I classified this as alleged racism, but it’ll be a shame if this ends up being a scam. Hoaxes of this nature illegitimize actual cases of racism and provide ammunition to those who claim that bigotry is not an issue in America. As it stands now, it sounds like Jenkins is REVERSE RACIST.
– Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, an old man who has used his platform in the past to fantasize about having sex with 23-year-olds, claimed in his latest word salad that people with “conventional views” have to supress a “gag reflex” when they see that New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who is white, walk down the street with his black wife. It was a clumsily-worded attempt to call Tea Partiers racist, but it says a lot about what goes on in the mind of this wealthy man living inside the media bubble of America’s capital that he’d think interracial marriages are still controversial. He continued by saying, “This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.” It’s not your country either, you tired old weirdo. I too have to supress my gag reflex when I look at your George Lucas-esque neck beard. 5
The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:
