I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (11 page)

All humans want to be surrounded by what they’re comfortable with. The black community is no different from any other in that regard. We are naturally drawn to what we can relate to. We like the idea that someone has our same hue of skin, comes from experiences that we can relate to, has a cadence that we can recognize. Let’s suppose you’re interviewing two people for a job. One reminds you of your son. The other is just as qualified, but you have no kind of connection to him. Who gets the job? It’s silly to pretend that’s not what happens.

Bill Clinton was not literally black—but he went to our churches, talked to us, ate our food, and knew our culture. He made a concerted effort, even though it’s political and it’s glad-handing, to relate to us. I might only have a GED, but I still know a thing or two. One of the most basic things they teach in marketing courses is
to match your product to your audience. McDonald’s can’t go into India, where the cow is revered, and have its menu be the same as it is in the U.S. There are entire websites dedicated to foreign companies that make unintentional jokes in English because they didn’t translate things correctly for the American market. That is what the Republican approach to the black community is like. They’ll make a political ad for their white voting base, and then use that exact same ad for a black audience.
Maybe
they’ll change the announcer to have a deep, black voice. But their entire argument amounts to “our philosophy works for us, so it’ll work for you. Not that I know anything about you, but I’m pretty sure it will.” They are not tailoring their message to their audience whatsoever, so
of course
no one is buying their product.

Sadly, it’s a simple fact that there are so few prominent black Republicans that I can easily discuss each one individually. One of the reasons I was so revolted by Herman Cain was his assertion that blacks hate those who stray from the Democratic plantation. Leaving aside the despicable choice of words, that’s demonstrably untrue. Speaking only for myself, I never hated Colin Powell. I have always liked and admired Condoleezza Rice,
personally
. I vehemently disagreed with the way she did things and with the outcome, but you’ll never hear me say things about Condi the way I said things about Herman Cain.

I very much dislike what Colin Powell
did
. He mortgaged his reputation at a time when few other people could have gotten that war started. That’s how high he was held in esteem by everyone in the country. As a result of his actions, lives were lost. I think that part of him
knew
that it wasn’t right. Some people say that, well, he was being a good soldier and a good soldier falls in line and falls on the grenade. But that’s a myth. A good soldier, especially a
good
American
soldier, is supposed to be a setter of truth. Soldiers have an obligation to refuse an order they know to be immoral. If a higher officer gives an order that’s illegal or immoral, a soldier can say no. If he
does
follow through and gets caught, he can still be prosecuted.

When all is said and done, Colin Powell is still very respected. I may not agree with him and I didn’t like who he worked for: I’ve wondered why on earth he allowed those things to happen. But he is still an extremely accomplished man who will always be held as a historically important figure. Every February, the one month when people care about blacks and their accomplishments, Colin Powell’s face will be on those place mats.

Condoleezza Rice is the same. If I had a question about an international issue, there might not be a single black person who would give me a better explanation than Condi Rice. There definitely wouldn’t be a black
woman
who understands world politics the way that she does. I probably would break with her when it came to her conclusions and her chosen response to an incident, but I know that her grasp of the technicalities would be, literally, world-class. She might be a Republican, but she is not a Bachmann or Palinesque lunatic. I would bet money, in fact, that she voted for Obama. She met with him and she’s talked to him, and she never says anything bad about him—even though she’s probably received a phone call or two suggesting that she do so for the good of the GOP.

None of their most vituperative opponents ever claimed that Colin Powell and Condi Rice got to where they are because of race. They were both extremely accomplished people and supremely qualified at what they did. Frankly, given who they were in cahoots with, I would argue that they were
over
qualified. They deserved better than what they got. So this idea that black people hate black
Republicans in general or that we hate them disproportionately to the rest of the Republican Party is a
lie
.

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.