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Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III (RG III,
as he is known) has a problem. It turns out that some black commentators, and
probably some black elites, don’t think he is black enough — because he dared
to publicly state that he didn’t want to be judged solely by his skin color
as an NFL quarterback.
Last Thursday morning on First Take,
ESPN’s Rob Parker uttered a comment for which he was later fired,
although he probably only said what some African Americans think but don’t
publicly express: “My question is, and it’s just a straight, honest question:
Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?”
I’d never heard the term before, so I did a quick
search and landed at Urban Dictionary.com. Here is the definition I found
there:
Cornball brother: An African-American man who
chooses not to follow the stereotype . . . life choices
include marrying white women, being a Republican, and not being ‘down with
the cause.’
Urban Dictionary also lists “corn dog brother” as
a related term and gives this example in its definition:
Leroy is a Republican who listens to country
music, enjoys golfing on weekends, and drives [an] eco-friendly car. He is a
corn dog brother.
I love it when I get an example with my
definitions!
Little did Parker know, he was performing a public
service by reminding the country of the interesting concept of the
not-black-enough brother.
And you wonder why there are not more black
Republicans?
Things got more interesting as Parker continued
his riff.
“He’s black, he does his thing, but he’s not
really down with the cause,” Parker continued. “He’s not one of us. He’s kind
of black, but he’s not really like the kind of guy you really want to hang
out with.” [Oh man, a stone racist, why would
anyone want to hang out with this fool. Oh yeah, he brought the keg.] Parker
admitted that he needed to learn more about Griffin’s personal life before he
could accept him as authentically black. “I just want to find out about him,”
he said. [As if it’s any of your F'n business, Bro.]
It could be a comedy routine on Saturday
Night Live [Actually “In Living Color” from back in the
day, they actually did routines on this subject, from both sides. I remember
a bit in which the brother who had risen through the ranks had to train his
white replacement. Followed by a meeting of the White Establishment to
confirm the change, hilarious! And all we remember is the beginning of J-Low’s
carrier.] — the notion of a
black man standing before some kind of Blackness Panel to determine if he’s
black enough. What would be the qualifications? Who would the questioners be,
and what would they ask? How would the scoring work, and would there be a
talent requirement? Singing and dancing, possibly? And an oath of black
allegiance at the end? [Ask J. Jackson, he’s the
one that wanted to disembowel The President when he was running against
Hillary.]
A comedy routine is exactly what this should be.
But it is a reality that black people face, although I hope it affects only a
thin minority of African-American commentators and elites. [Read “The Root”,
if you dare.]
But there are those words on Urban Dictionary.com,
those made-up, ugly words.
“I don’t know because I keep hearing these
things,” Parker explained. “We all know he has a white fiancée.”
There you have it! Exhibit A for expulsion from
the Blackness Club. What kind of authentic black man falls in love with a
white woman? [The operative term here is “falling in love”, rather than “bootie call”.]
“Then there was all this talk about he’s a
Republican,” Parker continued. “There’s no information at all [about that].”
He is marrying a white woman, and he might be a
Republican? That’s automatic disbarment from the Blackness Club. And a
lifetime pass to the Cornball Brother Hall of Fame. [Black
people are so weak. After a four hundred year fight to regain our honor “we”
roll over for a huckleberry like Parker? Damn shame.]
Parker finished his rant with this observation
about another not-so-black black man: “Because we did find out with Tiger
Woods, Tiger Woods was like, ‘I’ve got black skin, but don’t call me black.’
So people got to wondering about Tiger Woods.”
Didn’t white people used to get in big trouble for
this kind of backwards, exclusionary [Redneck] thinking?
It isn’t just athletes who face this scrutiny. And
it’s not just from black sportscasters. President Obama faced it, too.
In a column called “Colorblind,” in September of
2007, Debra Dickerson, the popular African-American columnist for Salon,
explained to her large following why she had waited so long to write about
then-candidate Obama. At the time, if you remember, the battle was between
two firsts: the first major-party female presidential nominee and the first
African-American presidential nominee. [Since
both candidates believed the same things the difference was mainly between
their legs.]
“Which brings me to the main reason I delayed
writing about Obama,” Dickerson wrote. “For me, it was a trick question in a
game I refused to play. Since the issue was always framed as a battle between
gender and race, I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to point out the
obvious: Obama isn’t black.” [Oh my Lordy Lord! Miss
Scarlet who might be that tan man in your bedroom, and especially before
afternoon tea!]
There goes that historic win for racial equality
in 2008! Dickerson thinks there should be an asterisk in the record books
next to Obama’s title as the first black president — because he has white
blood. [And where does that leave Bubbah?]
Wasn’t it white racists — along with eugenicists —
who deployed the “single drop” rule to perpetuate their worldview?
Colin Powell, too, came under fire for being
inauthentically black. Powell had the temerity to accept a position working
for President George W. Bush as America’s first African-American secretary of
state. Harry Belafonte lead the charge against Powell on Ted Leitner’s
popular San Diego talk show, in 2002:
There is an old saying, in the days of slavery.
There were those slaves who lived on the plantation, and there were those
slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house
if you served the master, do exactly the way the master intended to have you
serve him. That gave you privilege. Colin Powell is committed to come into
the house of the master, as long as he would serve the master, according to
the master’s purpose. [Oh that Harry, such the
revolutionary! “Day oh, Day oh, Day light come and me wan go home”, You know
the drill.]
And you thought the Taliban was tough? These race
brown shirts [Nice choice of color, since Hitler
felt that the US was irrelevant as an enemy since there were just too many
Negros and Jews to produce a formidable enemy. Maybe a notch above the Slavs,
maybe.] show little tolerance for people who don’t meet their code of
blackness, and even less for intellectual disobedience. Their law is simple:
Kiss the ring, and behave and believe as we tell you, or face excommunication
from the race. [As with General Zod, lost in Oreo
Cookie Land.]
Belafonte had similar unkind words for Condoleezza
Rice, who responded with a simple and strong statement: “I don’t need Harry
Belafonte to tell me what it means to be black.”
Poor Condi. She was thrown out of the brotherhood
and sisterhood for the role she played in a Republican administration.
And then there was Bill Cosby.
It was the NAACP’s 50th-anniversary celebration
of Brown v. Board of Education, in 2004, and Cosby had the
audacity to talk about some of the serious challenges facing African
Americans, particularly in America’s inner cities.
“Brown versus the Board of Education is
no longer the white person’s problem,” he said. “We’ve got to take the
neighborhood back. We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child
to go to the Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner.”
Not exactly fighting words, you’d think. Cosby
then addressed the problems confronting black Americans: senseless
black-on-black crime in America, failing public schools that so poorly serve
young black men, and a dysfunctional welfare state.
“There’s no English being spoken, and they’re
walking and they’re angry,” he said. “Oh, God, they’re angry and they have
pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill
somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A
pizza?”
He went on to talk about the problem of
illegitimacy as it affects black America: [Whose
that basketball dude with the umpteen chlian and that tribe of wives?]
Five or six different children, same woman, eight,
ten different husbands or whatever, pretty soon you’re going to have to have
DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who this
is. It might be your grandmother. I’m telling you, they’re young enough. Hey,
you have a baby when you’re twelve. Your baby turns 13 and has a baby, how
old are you? Huh? Grandmother.
He closed out the speech with some words about the
legacy of all of those who fought the civil-rights battles of the 1960s: “I
just want to get you as angry as you ought to be. When you walk around the
neighborhood and you see this stuff, that stuff’s not funny. These people are
not funny anymore. And that’s not [my] brother. And that’s not my sister.”
You would have thought Cosby would be celebrated
for the speech, and for the courage it took to make it on such a big night.
But no. Out came the Blackness Panel’s chief
enforcement agent. In a New York minute — or a Philadelphia nanosecond —
University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson [Black America’s A#1 asshole.] challenged not
only Bill Cosby’s comments, but Bill Cosby’s black bona fides.
“All who have made it need not have
‘Afroamnesia,’” Dyson told a University of Michigan audience, referring to
successful blacks such as Cosby who forget where they come from. Dyson
described the subsequent speeches Cosby made in defense of his original
speech as Cosby’s “Blame-the-Poor Tour.”
Dyson even managed to mock Cosby’s successful TV
series for not being black enough. It pandered to whites, he said, because
the show was about an intact black family — father and mother together —
living a traditional, upper-middle-class life.
How utterly unblack! [Shall
we bring up that old term Niggerremus?]
Dyson wrote the book Is Bill Cosby Right? to
offer a counterpoint to Cosby’s speech. In it, he attacked Cosby’s character
— and his heart.
“No matter how you judge Cosby’s comments, you
can’t help but believe that a great deal of his consternation with the poor
stems from his desire to remove the shame he feels in their presence and
about their activity in the world,” he wrote. “There’s nothing like a
formerly poor black multimillionaire bashing poor blacks to lend credence to
the ancient assaults they’ve endured from the dominant culture.” [There is nothing like a lame-o “Black Intellectual” fantasizing
over his wine and cigars about the lives of two beat thugs that he feels are
his underclass army, ready to over through the bourgeoisie, both black and white.]
Like Cosby, Tiger, Barack, Condi, and Colin, RG
III will hear more challenges to his blackness in years to come. Luckily, he
has his priorities lined up. When recently asked by a sports reporter what
his biggest fear was about coming to Washington, D.C., to be an NFL
quarterback, RG III had a simple answer: “You try not to fear too many
things. I fear God.”
After receiving an outpouring of support from
African Americans all over the country, and white Americans as well, RG III
had this to say to his fans on Twitter about the whole ESPN incident: “I’m
thankful for a lot of things in life, and one of those things is your
support. Thank You.”
Pure class. He never bothered to dignify the
claims of his critic, whose shrill commentary is a reflection not of
Griffin’s blackness, but of Parker’s refusal to respect the rich diversity of
his own people and the choices they make.
Blackness enforcers such as Parker are the ones
fixated on race as America lurches forward to a truly post-racial society, one
in which black people fall in love with white people and get married and few
people care.
Just the racists — white and black alike.
— Lee Habeeb is the vice president of
content at Salem Radio Network, which syndicates Bill Bennett, Mike
Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt. He lives in
Oxford, Miss., with his wife, Valerie, and daughter, Reagan.
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