Martin Luther King Day Meets Unexpected Resistance

by Isaiah Z. Sterrett

ADMITTEDLY, the Golden Globes are not of great importance. The idea that they’re “Hollywood’s biggest party,” as the blathering entertainment press likes to pretend, is preposterous. Regardless of how pitiful the Academy Awards sometimes are, the Oscar remains the most important American symbol of legitimate achievement in American film. The Golden Globes are merely an imitation.

Still, the Globes ceremony is on television every year. Consequently, those who may appear on the Globes telecast have a responsibility to employ at least the level of responsibility that, say, a four-year-old would. That means that racism is a no-no—even for people who have made their livings on racism, such as “comedian” Chris Rock. Sarcastically instructing a group of people that they “only have to be nice to black people for two more hours” counts as racism.

Chris Rock is occasionally humorous, but so are oncologists. This does not make cancer funny. For Chris Rock to grin at an international audience and suggest that white people find racial equality troublesome is offensive and a lie.

I will not spend time listing, for the thousandth time, the historical heroes who risked their lives to fight for civil rights for African Americans. But I will note that they existed—and exist today. One person who has not fought for civil rights is Chris Rock. He would probably be quick to align himself with Rosa Parks and Dr. King, for example, but, unlike Parks and King—actual heroes—Rock has spent his career upholding bigotry.

For readers lucky enough to have avoided Rock, I’ve compiled some quotations from his standup acts, “Bigger and Blacker,” and “Never Scared”:

--“If you’re white and under 21, I am headin’ for the hills.”

--“Is it me, or is Jermaine [Jackson] the craziest ni**er you ever you seen in your life?”

--“I think Bush sent that girl to Kobe’s room.”

--“Bush lied to me, they all lied to me.”

--“There was a lot of accepted racism when the war started.”

--“Shaq is rich. The white man that signs his check is wealthy.”

--“Only the white man can profit from pain.”

As the vigilant reader will observe, Chris Rock is approximately as funny as a plane crash—which probably underestimates the humor of plane crashes. Funny or not, however, Chris Rock has a clear history of racist ideals—which is not illegal, but is certainly, unquestionably immoral.

Of course, as wrong as Rock is—and as wrong as the Hollywood Foreign Press was to give him an audience—he is not an elected official. Hillary “Plantation” Clinton, soon to be fired by the people of New York, is.

It doesn’t really bother me that Hillary used an allusion to the antebellum South. That’s not the point. The problem is that she used such an allusion to compare Republicans to slave owners. Though Sen. Clinton has never actually owned slaves herself, she claims to love her party—a party which was once openly supportive of slavery on moral and practical grounds. That is not so much blatantly offensive as it is pathetic and delusional.

In a similar vein, creating the third part in a trio of racist fervor, we had Mayor Nagin of New Orleans announcing that his city will soon be a “Chocolate City.” As the Philadelphia Inquirer dryly editorialized, “God must want New Orleans to be a chocolate sundae. After all, He put a nut on top.”

I wish that Martin Luther King Day this year had been about the tolerance and racial equality King championed. But it wasn’t. It was about Chris Rock hallucinating racism, Hillary Clinton manufacturing racism, and Mayor Nagin condoning racism.

So much for Dr. King’s dream.