I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up

by D. L. Hughley

  What I hate is hypocrisy and condescension. Every black person knows that tone of voice that white people use to make them seem conciliatory and friendly. It’s the kind of tone you use when you’re talking to a strange dog to make it think you’re its friend. The dog might not know better, but humans sure as fuck do.

  There is no greater hypocrisy between the Republican Party and the black community than when it comes to affirmative action. I get why people are against affirmative action. It’s not a hard argument to make. The natural inclination for someone who isn’t black is to not give a shit about others and worry about his own people. It takes someone with a higher sense of decency and a better perspective to realize that extending opportunities to nonwhite Americans benefits both sides in the end. It’s the same as the arguments for NAFTA: Free trade between both groups enriches each partner.

  But some people don’t agree with that. They perceive America to be a white nation, even though my family has been here longer than, say, Pat Buchanan’s or Rick Santorum’s. They think blacks should be happy with the leftover crumbs we get. They regard us like guests in their home, and guests would do well not to complain too much lest they be thrown into the street. The fact that they don’t really know what “thrown into the street” in this analogy translates to in practice drives them to distraction. But this is their view, and I get it. They might not say it out loud or they might not even consciously realize it, but that’s their perspective.

  Affirmative action does not mean hiring an unqualified black person over a qualified white person. That’s tokenism. Affirmative action merely means that efforts should be made to find qualified black people, or to nurture environments, such as education, that allow minorities to become qualified. It means that if several people apply for a job, hiring a minority is regarded as a good thing. The argument that affirmative action is about racial preferences between two equally qualified candidates is nonsensical. When have two candidates for a job ever been “equally” qualified? There are so many things that go into a job interview, including candidates’ personalities and how they talk to you, that to imagine a scenario where there are two equal people is impossible. The only way that could happen is if you had identical twin brothers, one white and one minority. That’s not reality. That’s the premise to some terrible Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder movie that has never been produced.

  If you don’t believe in affirmative action, don’t practice it. But don’t rail against it, and then practice the caricature of affirmative action that you believe to be the real thing. Namely, don’t hire patently unqualified people in an attempt to curry favor with minorities. This is a transparent hypocrisy that fools no one. It only makes black people more aware of how stupid powerful whites think we are.

  Our recent history is replete with examples of this. When Obama first got into office, the Republicans did a couple of things that were specifically designed to say, “We got us one, too.” The person they chose to give the response to President Obama’s first State of the Union address was Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Why was a governor giving a response, when the pressing issue on the table was the federal stimulus plan? No one doubts that it’s because Bobby Jindal looked dark. They didn’t even have one black dude, but they had the grown-up kid from Slumdog Millionaire. That was the closest they had to a person of color. He sure wasn’t picked because of his inspiring oratorical skills; Jindal was so atrocious that they couldn’t use him again in the future.

  Right around the same time as this, Michael Steele was named chairman of the Republican National Committee. His résumé was being elected lieutenant governor of Maryland, obviously not a very powerful position—and one that he ascended to simply by being on the right ticket. When Steele next ran for Senate on his own merits, he lost by more than ten points. If race wasn’t a factor, if race wasn’t the deciding factor in his getting his job, then what was? Being a senatorial loser? Or spending four years waiting around in case the governor died?

  This is not a slight against Michael Steele. He got his job because of his race. At the very same time, I got a job because of my race. CNN wanted a black dude to appeal to the Obama crowd, and they hired me to host D. L. Hughley Breaks the News. Early on, I had Michael Steele on my show, and I told him as much. “We both got these jobs right now,” I pointed out on the air, “because there’s a black president.”

  He bristled. “That’s not true! I was around before Obama.”

  But it was true. Obama got him hired, and that very same interview with me got him fired. Later on the show, I asked him the same question that I had asked Congressman Ron Paul. “Is Rush Limbaugh the de facto leader of the Republican Party?”

  “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer,” Steele replied.

  But I pressed the issue, and eventually Steele ceded that Limbaugh was “a” leader of the Republican Party. The next day, everywhere I went it was all over the TV: Chris Matthews, CNN, NBC News, everyone was discussing the interview. And that same day, Rush Limbaugh was going in on it. He conveniently forgot his beloved President Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican,” because Steele was just a tool to him and not a real Republican politician. Limbaugh started attacking Steele, claiming he was never qualified to do the job as RNC chairman. Steele quickly recanted what he had said on my show, but Limbaugh kept going after him publicly. Who knows what was going on behind the scenes; it must have been hellacious. After that, confidence in Steele evaporated, and it snowballed until he lost his gig.

  If anyone has any doubt about the fact that Steele was simply brought in to be black on TV, they should look at what happened in the 2010 midterms. Michael Steele did exactly what he was supposed to do. Under his watch, he delivered the Republicans a profound congressional victory. They picked up more seats than in any election in the preceding seventy years. Steele certainly wasn’t the cause; there was anger and a lot of missteps on the Democratic side, among other things. But if you’re the head coach and your team wins, you fucking win. That’s how it goes! You don’t fire a dude who won the Super Bowl for you even if he was a crappy coach. You wait until shit falls off, and then you fire him.

  But mascots are a completely different story. They’re much more disposable. When Steele’s term was done, he couldn’t get reelected by his own people.

  Steele, at the very least, put himself out there. He argued the Republican cause on many television shows, understood the philosophy, and fought for his team. He had a record to be judged on. But if a so-called “affirmative action hire” is about choosing race over record, is there any better example than Clarence Thomas? Let’s compare Clarence Thomas’s record to that of the man he replaced, Thurgood Marshall.

  Marshall had argued for and won the Brown v. Board of Education case, easily one of the ten most important Supreme Court cases of the twentieth century, if not all time. When he was named to the Supreme Court, he had argued more cases in front of that court than any other attorney. Not only was he qualified: By that very valid standard, he was the most qualified candidate. It was like, “Motherfucker, you’ve been here so much, you might as well be one of us.” He had beat them and he had joined them.

  So when Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991, the first President Bush decided to appoint another black man to fill his shoes. But in true Republican fashion, “Any black man would do.” He nominated Clarence Thomas, who had less than two years of experience as a federal judge. Bush had the audacity to claim that Thomas was the “best qualified.” How is that even plausible, with so little experience? Thomas’s judicial hearings immediately divided public opinion. It wasn’t looking good for Clarence, so what did he do?

  He played the race card.

  Republicans love to get apoplectic when they claim that Democrats are playing the race card. Most of the time, it’s simply a matter of Democrats pointing out that Republican policy would disproportionately hurt black people and other minorities. In one sense, the Republicans are only acting
naturally. They don’t view blacks as their constituencies, so they’re looking after their own people at the expense of others. But in another sense, Fuck you. They claim that the race card is needlessly inflammatory, a low blow designed to eliminate civilized debate and introduce emotion into the discussion. No one has played the race card more brazenly than Clarence Thomas. No one has played it more publicly, more shamelessly, and more outrageously than when he categorized criticism of himself as “a high-tech lynching.” He didn’t play it in circumstances in which he was going to get the death penalty. He didn’t play it when an entire community was going to be hurt by proposed political actions. No, Clarence Thomas played it because he wasn’t going to get a promotion. He played it simply because he wasn’t going to get his way in the Senate confirmation hearings.

  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.