Jul
27
2024

Parody Alert!

And it's kind of genius:

Also of note:

  • I don't think I've ever asked a single question about Harris and race. Nevertheless, John McWhorter claims We’re Asking the Wrong Question About Harris and Race.

    In the wake of Joe Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, a great deal of attention has focused on whether America is ready for a Black female president. Unmentioned is a question of equal complexity: Why is Harris Black? Hear me out.

    As she has proudly recounted, the vice president is the product of an interracial, intercultural marriage between a mother who emigrated from India and a father who emigrated from Jamaica. So in terms of her ancestry, she is as much South Asian as she is Black. By widespread convention, however, people refer to her not primarily as a South Asian presidential candidate, nor even a mixed-race candidate, but rather a Black candidate.

    It’s not just Harris. Barack Obama, with one Black and one white parent, is called Black. Imagine how strange it would be if someone called him white. Imagine how strange it would be if he called himself white. Harris often mentions the South Asian half of her heritage, but in traditional American discourse, it feels off to categorize her as simply South Asian — like Aziz Ansari or Mindy Kaling — and leave it there. Yet calling her just Black, as a kind of shorthand, feels right. Blackness is treated as blacking out, so to speak, whatever other race is involved. Most people default to this perspective — myself included.

    This approach contradicts not just logic, but also itself. In contrast to the centuries-old “one-drop rule” that segregationists have invoked to describe the indelible ancestral stain of so-called Black blood, enlightened people are supposed to believe that race is purely a social construct, with no biological basis. If so, then why does having some Black forebears make you Black, regardless of the rest of the family tree?

    McWhorter's "wrong" question seems to be the one implied in sentence one above: "Is America ready for a Black female president?"

    My answer, sure, if Condi Rice were on the ballot.

    But McWhorter's right to note the weird way "we" pigeonhole people racially. I'll try not to do this.

  • They are wind instruments, mostly. Jonah Goldberg claims: The Media Are Not Instruments of the Parties.

    Whenever Katy Tur or Chuck Todd are trending on Twitter, I check out why. It turns out that progressives are convinced that Tur and Todd are Trump boosters, something literally no conservative thinks is true, let alone Trump fans. As best I can tell, the only reason lefties loath [sic] Tur and Todd so much is that they occasionally ask questions or make observations that deviate from the prevailing progressive storyline.

    One incident—an April interview with Nancy Pelosi—looms particularly large with MSNBC’s core audience. The former speaker was laying into Trump for having “the worst record of job loss of any president. So we just have to make sure people know.”

    At that point, Tur interjected: “There was a global pandemic.” Pelosi went silent for a moment, staring daggers at the anchor, and then said, coldly, “He had the worst record of any president. We’ve had other concerns in our country. If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that may be your role, but it ain’t mine.”

    This elicited—and continues to elicit—all sorts of “slay queen” praise for Pelosi and unhinged outrage at Tur.

    But Tur was obviously right. I mean, totally and irrefutably right. Tur’s sin was simply that she got in the way of a very cheap talking point that persuades no one who isn’t already 100 percent in the anti-Trump column. 

    I know it's tiresome when I say this but: I noticed this too. For some reason I noticed that "Katy Tur" was trending on Twitter X, and I clicked to find out why, and noticed the vituperation. (If you want to check for yourself: here you go; most of it's still up.)

    And, by the way, I expect to be using that word "vituperation" a lot in the coming months.