Is Racism Against Whites the “New Black”?
I stopped watching Saturday Night Live right about the time it stopped being funny. The days of Will Ferrell, Chris Farley, and too many others to name are, sadly, long gone.
Think back, if you’re old enough to remember, to a time when Christopher Walken was on the show. Imagine what would have happened had he opened SNL with a lively monologue that consisted entirely of talk about his white-ness, how great it is to be white, and ended with promoting his latest movie in which he kills all the black people and thinks that’s just fantastic. Better yet, what if Christopher had taken the time to talk about how white his President was, and promised more white-ness in his second term?
Think that would stir up just a tad bit of controversy? I imagine it would.
You can imagine, then, the outrage of many Americans as they watched Jamie Foxx embark on his own racist rant on NBC’s Saturday Night Live show this past weekend.
Newsbusters transcript:
JAMIE FOXX: My name is Jamie Foxx. Give it up, give it up, New York City, Saturday Night Live. Come on, make some noise, man. New York City, New York City, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, it’s crazy. I’m black, and I’m dressed all black cause it’s good to be black. Black is the new white. I’m telling you, how black is this right here? Nice fly, I’m saying. You know how I know black is in right now? Cause the Nets moved to Brooklyn. How black is that? They got black jerseys, black court. I mean, how black is that? And Jay-z is the owner, a rapper. How black is that? And Jay-z only own about this much of the team. But he act like he own all of New York. How black is that?
And I got a movie coming out, “Django,” check it out. Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson. “Django Unchained” I play a slave. How black is that? And in the movie I had to wear chains. How whack is that? But don’t be worried about it because I get out the chains, I get free, I save my wife, and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that? And how black is that?
But I’m going to tell you right now, speaking of blackness, my President, President Obama is back up in the White House four more years. How black is that? And not only that, he’s so black, he was playing basketball during the Election Day. How black is that? But he was also late for his acceptance speech. Okay, all the white people, this is your turn – how black is that?
But he going to be extra black this next four years. He going to get everything black, and white people, don’t get nervous about that because he is mixed. Now the first four years was the white side of him, because I don’t know if you saw him on Ellen when he was dancing and everything. I don’t know what this is. That wasn’t President Obama, that was President Barry Gibb Obama. But the next four years he’s even changing his name from to President Barack Dikembe Mutombo Tupac Mandela Hussein Obama X. How black is that? And the next time you see him dancing on Ellen, he gonna be dancing like this.
Foxx’s rhetoric comes as no surprise after his reference to the President as “Lord and Savior” at last month’s Soul Train Awards, but does anyone else feel like we live in a world gone utterly insane? Would this have been acceptable under any pre-Obama Presidency in recent history? I thought this President was going to usher us into a “post-racial era.”
Sadly, with trends like “my President is black” and “f— white people” on twitter in the days prior to and following the November election, rants like Foxx’s latest, and with a complicit media, I hardly think one can claim we’ve moved forward one iota when it comes to race relations in the United States under the Obama Presidency. If anything, we’ve travelled a long, long way in the opposite direction.
Written by Tami Nantz
