Update on the State of Race Relations in America
So here is an interesting local story giving us a window into race relations. First, a black comedian named Katt Williams (I never heard of him either) called a Mexican man a "nigga" and told him to go back to Mexico. Then a Hispanic woman created a profanity-laced 6-minute video calling Katt Williams "a white supremacist."
Outstanding. Actually, I think that this has little to do with race relations and more to do with a post-modernist view of language. I am still working on writing about this phenomenon, wherein certain political phrases have become all-encompassing insults or descriptors of the opposition, wholly stripped of their original meaning. Thus "Soros-funded" or "Koch-funded" become synonyms for being extreme left or libertarian, rather than actually being supported by any evidence of such funding. My interest in this topic began with a comment on Kevin Drum's site, where one sympathetic reader smacked Tea Partiers as merely mouthing Republican talking points, and the proceeded to repeat in now-standard terminology every Democratic talking point about the Tea Party. The juxtaposition was so obvious I thought it might be performance art rather than a real comment.
