Colbert dismantles Debra Dickerson
Please subscribeDebra Dickerson has taken a lot of heat (at least from me) for her controversial article entitled Obama Isn’t Black:
“Black,” in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can’t be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both “black” as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term.
Given all that, you knew it was going to be good when Colbert had her on The Report.
He set the stage immediately when he plugged her book:
Colbert: Your book is called The End of Blackness and I want to come out right here and say I’m against ending blackness. I believe that everyone has a right to be black. It’s a choice and I support that. Now settle something for me. Is Barack Obama black?Dickerson: No, he’s not…(see above).
Colbert: OK, so if he’s not black, why doesn’t he just run as a white guy? Because we know that black people will vote for white people and white people will vote for white people, but we’re not sure that white people will vote for black people….
Dickerson: Well, he’s not white either. He is an African African-American….
Colbert: Should we make up a new name for what he is?
Dickerson: Yes, we should.
Colbert: What about nouveau-black?
It spirals quickly into the loony-sphere after that. Watch it. It made my day.
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It was very amusing.
Though, if you think about it, “culture” is much more meaningful than skin color, by orders of magnitude.
I hear you.
On the other hand, it would be hard to refute that because there have been so few major-party presidential candidates who were black.
That’s also about culture.
I respectfully disagree. As we know, people judge you mostly by how you look, somewhat by how you sound and a little bit by what you say.
So, unfortunately, if you are black, I think it’s going to be mostly about the color of your skin.
Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. The tendency to make decisions about people based upon the color of their skin isn’t really about the color of their skin. It’s about the culture of the racist. Culture - shared experiences, biases, beliefs, fashions, etc. - is what determines who people are.
Right — and/but:
70% How you look
20% How you sound
10% What you say
Shame about that.
Although, apologies to Izzard (who is making an important point), what I’m talking about is not limited to just skin color. No one can tell a metrosexual from gay or a Democrat from Republican, Jew from Arab, just by outward appearance. Yet people from certain “cultures” might despise people from any of these groups just because of their own cultural prejudices. Similar skin-color blacks, questioning Obama’s “blackness” because of his culture, may be an example of just that sort of cultural bias.
Again: skin color almost always trumps everything.
Consider this: you have two evangelical Christians who agree on everything, except one is black and one is white.
Would you agree or disagree that the white Christian is treated differently than the black Christian?
I would say that it matters a lot in what culture the black Christian lives - and has for a long time. A black Christian living in Boston and one living in Macon in the early 1800s would be treated quite differently. I would also say that blacks who adopt white culture are treated less and less differently than whites. Particularly the “articulate, clean” ones.
I suppose there’s no need to point out that I also don’t live in the southeastern US.