A parody song about Barack Obama has been making the rounds of the talk shows.
This from “Crooks and Liars”:
BREAKING: Limbaugh’s “Barack the Magic Negro,” on-air song has workers up in arms
By: John Amato on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 12:44 PM – PDT
UPDATED: Rush Limbaugh has angered many black employees over this parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro” This isn’t the first or the last time that Limbaugh will go after Obama’s race:
I’ve been told that they have held meetings internally to deal with a ground swell of anger at Rush because of this.
UPDATE: I’ve anonymously confirmed that stations around the country who carry the show are having concerns expressed by listeners and even their own workers of color about the Obama parody, and the ensuing controversy in the media, and that respective managements are considering ways to address the matter with as little Imus-like backlash as possible,..This is starting to boil over…
A caller noticed there was a disclaimer added to the station she listens to and asks Rush why.
Comment:
Why is accusing the United States government (ala Jeremy Wright) of using biological weapons against its minority citizens racist, but demeaning a black presidential candidate, a perfectly vacuous candidate in our humble opinion, NOT? Oh, because “Barack, the Magic Negro” is hip sociological talk, we hear:
“The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. “He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist,” reads the description on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro .
It’s an Al Sharpton phrase, Al Sharpton being tacky-race-theorist-in-residence on the American political scene. (Not that I don’t think Sharpton isn’t sometimes funny, but if you live by race, you’re going to die by it — and don’t complain).
In other words, it’s the old business of who says what. If rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg calls a woman a “ho,'” then that is social commentary; but if you (Joe Six-pack) do it, well, that’s sexist abuse.
Alright. Let’s stipulate that. If you’re a guy, you don’t get to call the ladies “ho’s” any more than if you’re white in 21st century USA you get to refer to blacks as “negros” (in a derogatory way) without raising up a few racial ghosts, even if the self-appointed guardians of racial morality do.
We get that part.
What we don’t get is this: when we’ve had evidence from Tuskegee onward that governments, and not just in the US, are capable of just about anything against their own citizens, why is it racist to state the perfectly libertarian proposition that states are inherently murderous, but OK and even rather funny to use a stealth-racialist label on an individual who’s no more or less a bland apparatchik than any white candidate? (And we’re not Obama-bots here).
Of course, the Right Reverend Wright didn’t do himself or Obama any favors by his firebrand performance over the weekend. His makeover into introspective new, new theologian by Bill Moyers was an impressive act of cross-dressing, but his subsequent reversal to black theo-speak at the National Press Club undid that performance thoroughly.
The chickens-coming-home-to-roost explanation of American foreign policy is a banality of left-wing analysis, at home on many academic campuses, but add a dashiki and the visceral cadences of black preacher-talk, and it becomes the verbal equivalent of Jimi Hendrix playing The Star Spangled Banner.
It’s powerful stuff dressing up American government history as a morality play. But as foreign policy analysis, it’s weak. But then again, having been happy to confuse the two whenever it suited us, we’ve only ourselves to blame for this conflation of the moral and the political…..
So we’re left impressed only by the Reverend’s sincerity (conceded even by Newt Gingrich ) and unerring eye for a You-Tube moment (and there’s that million dollar mansion and the book tour to come) and quite unimpressed by whoever it is who manages the Barack Balancing Act — you know, placate the base (Weatherman buddy,– hat tip to The Absurd Report for that – Farrakhan bodyguards, Wright sermons) but aim for the center ( working-class white fears, health care, jobs).
So far, Obama’s aim’s been pretty rotten. He was loyal to his inflammatory pastor….and for payback, the guy tossed him into the flames.
It should have been all over for Obama by now.
But now comes this…..
Sometimes I have to wonder if Limbaugh is an undercover Air America operative….