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The Real Reason Why Stephen Colbert’s Brand of Racism Should Be Making You Angry #CancelRedskins
Stephen Colbert’s television persona is a racist. This is nothing new. The Colbert Report, as a comedy show built specifically to be a mock-ultra-conservative news program, has since its inception sought to portray the most offensive moments and opinions from America’s right wing. So why the sudden movement, this sudden Twitter uprising, to #CancelColbert?
On Wednesday, March 26, Colbert announced that he was creating a foundation called, “The Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or whatever.” This was horribly racist in the ways in which it used stereotypical, belittling, and highly offensive language to feign goodwill toward Asians. But Colbert says horribly racist and offensive things on a regular basis, most of which receive no negative press whatsoever. (One example that I can recall without difficulty was when he said that it is a compliment to say that, “Hispanic kids murder everyone at half the price.” 10/2/2013) But this time, this particular joke, was at long last too much for some segments of the general public to bear.
Yes, using racism in humor is dangerous. Using racist language and asking people to laugh at it can be an insidious, veiled way of perpetuating racism. By encouraging people to laugh at racism, comedians hold power to normalize and encourage people to accept racist notions. But again none of this is new for comedians or for the Colbert Report. What was new in this particular case was the form that Colbert’s racist joke took, and the model for that joke was firmly rooted in the racist reality for Indigenous people of this hemisphere—a reality in which Native Americans are homogenized, commodified, made invisible, and systematically oppressed by the dominant culture and media.

Many still believe that the use of the derogatory and highly offensive name, Daniel Snyder’s Washington Redskins, is not problematic. And those who fail to see the problem here are similarly unlikely to see the painful irony in the newly formed Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation (though the offensive nature of such a foundation name became far more obvious to most when rewritten by the Colbert writing team to target Asians). Many people still claim that anyone who takes offense at this R-word is being too sensitive. This ignores the fact that the R-word calls up a history of genocide against the multitudes of Native men, women, and children. This racial slur posing as a sports team name serves as a constant reminder of the continuation of oppressive practices, as it is now regularly used and plastered on the news, on billboards, on web ads and fan pages, on clothing, and now, to top it all off, as the name of an organization purportedly built to help the diverse Indigenous groups that it continues to harm.

The Stephen Colbert character, in his usual style, has taken the offenses done by others and made them that much more offensive. The show dismantled the offense moniker of Daniel Snyder’s foundation, and rebuilt it with a more visible ethnic group as its target. The result—outrage. At the end of the skit, Stephen Colbert, as a kind of nod to the offensive nature of the skit, makes a request of his audience. “I owe all this sensitivity to Redskin’s owner, Daniel Snyder. So Asians, send your thank you letters to him, not me.“
If you are angry, welcome to the club. Be angry at Stephen Colbert and his show, a show that mirrors and perpetuates the prevalence of racism, classism, and oppression in order to get a laugh. But be more angry at the reality that the Colbert Report mocks. Be angry at Daniel Snyder, the owner of that offensively named Washington team. Be angry that corporate interests (and there are many) continue to make money on histories of genocide and oppression.
risingphoenix87 reblogged this from theangrychicana and added:
THIS. People who are mad at Stephen Colbert are angry with the wrong person. In fact, it’s less a person that should...
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