Talking about Thugs Again

Some folks believe that when you pay attention to racists, you only give them power.

I don't know if this is true, but it sounds like it could be. But those folks who espouse this belief need to explain to me how they control the anger that bubbles up within them when confronted with the most obvious forms of racism and hypocrisy. And if their answer is that they don't have those feelings anymore, then we really don't need to speak anymore.

Really.

I say all that because even though I know Fox News is a bastion of racism and hypocrisy that draws its inspiration from the good old days of America, those bastards still have the power to make me angry. Even when I tell myself to expect the worst, I can still be surprised at how low they will stoop to advance their memes.

Take the recent controversy surrounding rapper Common. I know a little something about Common because he's my best friend's favorite artist. I know a little about his story, and I've listened to most of his albums. And I can say one thing for certain, Common Sense hasn't been a "thug" for quite some time.

But, don't tell that to Fox News. They are convinced he's your typical violent rapper hell bent on overthrowing the police and every other aspect of respectable society. And they believe it figures that President Obama would invite a thug like that to speak about poetry at the White House.

It doesn't matter that Fox has praised Common in the past. It doesn't matter that they have praised artists like Kid Rock an Ted Nugent. What matters is that Common is a nigger who raps and he's easy prey to advance the meme that Obama is a white-hating bastard who should be rubbed out at the first opportunity. That's all that matters.

And while I know it's simplistic and false and will be forgotten in a week, it still eats at me. It eats at me that a man with some complex thoughts could be distilled into such a false image, and then have to watch that false image blasted out to the world. It hurts because I can see how it could happen to me and any other black man so easily. It's so easy to turn us into monsters.

Common talks about burning a bush in a poem spoken in Jamaican patois, and nobody even considers that maybe he's not talking about the president? Nobody thinks that maybe he was saying something else, because what type of Negro would have the mind power to think that creatively, right? It makes me sick

Hell, for many white folks, that's the default setting anyway.



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