Claims of ‘racism’ unfounded, frivolous
So, another race-related controversy has balled out of control. The Colbert Report’s official twitter account posted: “I’m willing to show the #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”
As you might expect, Twitter went absolutely out of its mind. Calls for #CancelColbert ricocheted across the Internet, prompting him to address the concept next week on-air. He refused to apologize for the tweet, which neither he or his team had any part in producing, instead repeating the phrase twice on his show and making fun of the whole brouhaha.
What he said was racist, right? Well, no. Not really.
Before someone starts drawing the long knives, there’s some much-needed context here. The tweet was prompted by the hilariously named Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, created by Daniel Snyder, who owns the team in question.
An organization devoted to helping Native Americans which uses the word “Redskins” in its title is absurd.
Using a well-known concept called “satire,” Colbert, in defending the joke which he did not write, thinks that the “Redskins” foundation nonsense was as silly as naming a charitable organization for the purpose of helping Asian-Americans “the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation.”
Now that I’ve painfully dissected (and thereby killed forever) this joke, there’s a whole host of issues that deserve a some mention.
The fact is that some people are much more attuned to offense than humor. Should a joke touch on race or religion, these individuals immediately become defensive. To them, these jokes are not only inappropriate, but might even be considered “hate speech,” which might call for lawfully restricting the teller’s right to speak. “Bad taste” is the calling cry.
I don’t want to be taken the wrong way here. One of the first rules of comedy is to “know your audience.” But the difference between not liking certain kinds of jokes and keeping up a morally outraged position is that the former people don’t want you telling anyone else these jokes to anyone, in any context.
Arguing with these kind of people is pointless. Anything that one says is neatly deflected by, “Well, that hurts my feelings.”
This is where identity politics neatly steps into the conversation. The leader of the whole #CancelColbert business, Suey Park, is very good at starting these kind of flash pan movements. A self proclaimed “hashtag activist,” she started the movement to “critique white liberals who use forms of racial humor to mock more blatant forms of racism,” as reported by the New Yorker.
There’s a trap here. By implying that racial humor abets racism, she drops a huge generalization on everyone: If you write satire concerning race, you are a racist. And, according to her, “Only white people CAN be racist.”
So, it follows that only non-white people can mention race and humor in the same breath, even in cases of satire. Also, white people, no matter what, can’t be discriminated against at all. Again, I guess you can go around believing this.
If you can find yourself emotionally shaken by reading an out-of-context tweet (written by a well-known satirist) on the Internet, my question is this: How exactly does such a person get through the day without breaking down internally?
Nothing changes the fact that this is a non-issue, as shown by the lack of seriousness and contradictions in the person who started it.
Could it be, perhaps, that this individual likes being offended? That being a part of a large, self-righteous, self-pitying social media wave is a fun way to spend some time?
(Park said herself that she doesn’t actually want to see the show canceled. So what was that whole #CancelColbert thing about? Just for fun?)
People don’t think about race enough. People don’t talk about race enough. But misquoting and trying to elicit apologies from a satirist isn’t the way to go about it.
No matter how you cut it, you know what happens if that apology comes out? Nothing. A professional jokester tunes down his rhetoric. Nothing happens. Racism remains.