I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (12 page)

What would it look like in a boardroom if some black dude at the company got passed over for a promotion and claimed that he was being
lynched
? That shit wouldn’t fly at Merrill Lynch. Everybody would be thinking to themselves,
See, this is why you can never hire these people. They bring race into everything and they’re completely shameless and out of control
. Then the company lawyers would look into how they could unload this dude as quickly as possible, what the cost would be to pay him off, and how they could best get him to shut the fuck up and go away. Any of his allies in the firm would be mortified that he humiliated them like that in front of the board. “I had your back, man, and you say that they’re
lynching
you? How does that make me look?”

I have never heard a single conservative thinker denounce Thomas’s comments. They don’t have to make a big spectacle about it. All they need to say is, “I thought Clarence Thomas got a raw deal during his hearings and I thought Anita Hill was a liar. But I think his referring to it as a ‘lynching’ was unfair and needlessly inflammatory.” Even in retrospect, twenty years later, no one has a problem with it. Why is that? Do they really take issue with the race card being used in politics? Or is it that they have a problem with being publicly called out on their
bullshit
?

When I tell people that Clarence Thomas has never asked one single question during his tenure at the Supreme Court, it sounds like I am exaggerating for comedic effect. That is so preposterous that it seems impossible to be true.
Look it up
. When I tell people
that he has not written a single majority opinion in his two decades on the bench, it seems ridiculous.

I’m not going to call Clarence Thomas an Uncle Tom, as others have done. I wouldn’t call
anyone
an Uncle Tom: I think that is a needlessly offensive term thrown out too lightly. I don’t know what’s in the man’s heart. I can make educated guesses, but that would be presumptuous. But I would
like
to know what’s in his heart. How can I, if the dude won’t say shit? Even motherfucking Helen Keller could tell me that she was feeling “water, water!” I, and the rest of America, have no real record to judge this judge. Being a judge is like the opposite of being a criminal. If you’ve got a long record as a criminal, you’re probably a person who’s mixed up in all sorts of crazy shit. But if you’re a judge, a long record speaks to your accomplishments and the quality of your legal mind—and the opposite holds true as well.

If people questioned my intellect, my competence, and my character, I would do my best to show them to be wrong. I definitely wouldn’t want to shut the fuck up. You don’t have to be slick and well spoken. Even if you don’t say anything, you can write things that are stellar. It’s almost like Clarence Thomas is a guy who’s determined
not
to be shown to be competent.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Clarence Thomas has felt the sting of racism. In fact, since he’s older and since he’s from the South, I’m sure he’s experienced it to a greater extent than
I
have. The people who perpetrated those things against him
then
look an awful lot like the people that he hangs out with
now
. He grew up around men who looked and talked like Haley Barbour and Rick Perry—and I am sure he was not treated particularly well by them. For his conclusion to be, “I want to be more like the people who perpetrated these crimes against me,” I find that really unfortunate.

I will acknowledge that it is much easier to be a critic than to offer constructive advice. After all, opinions are like assholes: They usually stink and no one really wants to hear them. Unlike the Republicans, I don’t think the black community is a lost cause. So I’m going to do their job for them and tell them how they can actually get a tiny bit of the black vote. Let’s suppose lightning struck and I was named Republican Party chairman. And let’s suppose further that I was given the unenviable task of making inroads into the black community. It would be difficult but not impossible. Here’s what I would advise:

Stop secretly playing the race card
. Immediately after LBJ alienated all the racists, the Republicans saw the Southern vote as ripe for the picking (pun intended). For the first time ever, literally
ever
, there was now a possibility for the Republican Party to carry the South in free elections. The GOP didn’t try to hide its agenda. It openly and explicitly refers to this as its “Southern strategy.”

Though the strategy is public, the application is insidious. The Republicans do things that are ambiguous enough that they can claim that they don’t know why people get offended. When George Allen said “macaca,” he knew what that meant. He simply hoped that nobody else did. Can a senator, a member of perhaps the greatest debating society in the Western world, really be using epithets without knowing their application? When Newt Gingrich referred to Obama as the “food-stamp president,” he explicitly claimed he did not understand why people got offended. Not that he didn’t
agree
, but that he didn’t
understand
. Playing dumb when you’re not dumb is
lying
. Playing dumb about
race
when you’re not dumb is
race baiting
.

In that exact same vein, things like having confederate symbols on the state flag are automatically nonstarters for black people. It’s a way for the Republicans to talk out of both sides of their mouth, to ally with racists while claiming they’re for “tradition.” How can a Southerner claim to uphold tradition and then vote Republican? The GOP started as a regional party opposed to slavery and Southern economic interests. There were many places in the South where Lincoln, the first Republican president, got
zero
votes.

Why would the South revere the Civil War period, anyway? That was an ass-whupping! The human brain is psychologically designed to
repress
ass-whuppings. People who grow up beaten and abused become adults with no memories of the fact. They don’t dress up and
reenact
the trauma. The Confederacy was all about
oppressing
. It was all about fighting for the right to keep black people under its boot. Who would want to recall that,
unless
you have a fond memory of it? The South harks back to this era because it’s the last time that it was unfettered and got to be what it was.

Of course the rebel flag is about racism,
period
. It’s like this: Let’s suppose you had a guest to your home who was deathly allergic to lemons. Whenever she smelled lemons, she got sick to her stomach and felt very uncomfortable. Would any host serve a lemon dish, simply because the recipe had been in the family for generations? Obviously, you accommodate your guests and make them feel welcome. At the very least, you don’t make them feel violently (and I do mean
violently
) unwelcome. That’s what flying the rebel flag is like. But black people aren’t “guests” in this country. We’re citizens, too.

Get off your high horse
. Black people are generally socially conservative. We believe in God at a level that’s probably as rabidly
religious or theological as anyone else. Black people dislike almost everything that social conservatives dislike. You might never know it from how many of us are sitting in jail, but from gays to drugs to pornography, black people are against it—especially black
women
, who vote in far larger numbers than black men. But they’re not
hateful
about it. The tone is not one of “lock them up and throw away the key.” There is a sense of compassion, which is a feeling completely antithetical to the Republican mindset.

Condemn disrespect against minorities
. The best example of this I can think of is when Michelle Obama went to a NASCAR event in late 2011 and got
booed
. Not only did she get booed, she got booed while appearing with a wounded soldier and the Obama
children
. What message does that send to black people? Despite their fears that she would be Omarosa, Michelle Obama has been utterly apolitical as first lady. She isn’t anywhere near as active as a Hillary Clinton, or even Nancy Reagan for that matter. She works for gardening and for healthier eating. That’s not
activism
. That’s some vapid Mamie Eisenhower–type shit. Irrespective of one’s political beliefs, what is the message to black people when the first lady is booed? How could
any
patriotic American endorse that? Yet the Republicans didn’t speak out for fear of appearing soft or alienating their constituency. All they needed to say is something along the lines of, “Mrs. Obama and I obviously have different views as to who should be the president, but to have a first lady of the United States being booed in public anywhere in this country is outrageous and unacceptable.” But even that platitude is too much for them.

Attend black events
. Yes, it will probably be uncomfortable. It would not be a very welcoming audience. But it would be a fuckload
more comfortable and welcoming than going to some places in the Middle East, say. You
never
see a Republican presidential candidate at the
Soul Train Awards
or something similar. The crowd won’t cheer for them, but they won’t be booing, either. It’s not like going onstage during
Showtime at the Apollo
, believe you me. Too “pop culture”? That’s fine. Only someone who thinks that black Americans are unmitigated savages would believe that
anyone
would be disrespected in a
church
. No audience would do it, and no pastor would allow it.

Black people see Democrats appear at functions that are important to us. The politicians will go honor some leader that they find amazing (or they
claim
to find amazing), or they’ll know somebody’s name in the community, or they’ll sit down and eat in a soul-food restaurant. News like that travels, and those things seem important. The same pancake breakfast that Republicans go to for the religious crowd can be had in a black community. And when the pictures run in the paper, they’ll look a lot better than those corn-dog blowjob photos out of Iowa.

Stop regarding us as having a hive mind
. When one black person says something Republicans
don’t
like, he’s indicative of all black people to them. “That’s how they
all
think! They all think the same way!” But when a black person says something that Republicans
like
, then it becomes, “Why can’t you be more like this guy?” Just because we’re all unified against the GOP doesn’t mean we’re all unified otherwise.

Unbutton the collars
. In 2008 I said on CNN that the Republican National Convention looked like Nazi Germany. I had never seen a whiter and more austere gathering. It wasn’t simply that it was all “white”; it was
buttoned-up
white people and their buttoned-up
sons and daughters. White people as a group can be pretty diverse. You’ve got George Bush, and you’ve got Kid Rock, and you’ve got Lady Gaga. Show it!

Stop the legal double standard
. When the system is rigged to deliberately make it harder for my kids than it is for white kids, then clearly the party of “order” is fighting against me. This double standard crosses all criminal activity. I read an article referring to the Department of Justice, and it pointed out that 75 percent of people arrested in this country are white. Yet a majority of the people in jail are black. Judges, consciously or not, prefer to mete out “mercy” for their own, the white offenders, while delivering “justice” for people they have no connection to, poor black males.

Die
. One of my close friends is a die-hard Raiders fan. I asked him what it would take for the Raiders to get better. “They’ll get better,” he told me, “now that Al Davis died.” It’s the same thing with the Republican Party and those who run it. All the Newts Gingrich, all the people who look like Romney, all those people who believe that there’s a certain way you’re supposed to be—when that mentality and that physical presence dies, the GOP and the
world
can move on.

It’s like America’s waiting for its grandmother to croak so we can inherit her house. We don’t
want
her to die, and I certainly don’t wish for the death of anyone (especially someone who I simply disagree with politically). But at the same time, just like with Grandma, it’s impossible to deny that some good will come out of this death. Without a death, there can’t be a resurrection.

That old mentality, those old ways of seeing the world, is a major reason why the Republican Party is anathema to the black
community. The vitriol and the venom and the acrimony in our politics comes from people who never in their lives thought they would see a black man being the symbol of America. It was unfathomable to them. In many ways it
remains
unfathomable to them. It’s driven them mad to the extent that they will purposefully damage this country to get rid of him.