What We Can Learn From the Embarrassing #CancelColbert Shitstorm

What We Can Learn From the Embarrassing #CancelColbert Shitstorm

As I see it, the most important lesson is that many people are both stupid and lazy. As Dean Wormer might have pointed out, that's no way to get through life, son.

Stupid? The average person doesn't seem to understand the difference between the words of an actual racist and those of a fictional character who is either speaking in the vernacular of his own era or is meant to be a lampoon of racism. I know this from experience. I used to write Uncle Scoopy in a character voice. Scoop was a dumb-ass Texas redneck. It was completely obvious that he was a parody. His real name was N. Robert "Scoop" Parking. The N stands for "No" and Texans call him No Bob. His mom gave him that name because she noticed that big executives and movie stars get marked parking places, therefore she named her son No Parking so that he would always have a marked space. No Bob had a cousin named "Two Hour." It's hard to believe that people could take any of that seriously, but they did. Then again, those are the same people that think Huck Finn should not use the "N" word, even though Mark Twain made him one of the most realistic and complicated characters in the history of fiction, and that's exactly how he would have talked in that era. Anyway, I kept the Scoopy name but dropped the character voice when people started accusing me of supporting Scoop's positions rather than ridiculing them.

Lazy? Few people bothered to research the situation to see what Colbert's words meant in the context of the story he was presenting. The owner of the Redskins pulled a massive scam on the same level as "carbon offsets." He claimed that he gets to keep the name "Redskins," and the related racist iconography, because he established some kind of half-assed charitable fund (with the word "Redskin" actually in the name of the foundation - I did not make that up!) to give the modern equivalent of beads and trinkets to Native Americans. Colbert's character, a far right nutjob, praised the groundbreaking move, and said that he could now do a racist Chinese caricature because he had established a charitable foundation for "orientals or whatever." In context, Colbert's remarks were not racist at all. First of all, Colbert the character is SUPPOSED to be racially insensitive. Second, Colbert the real person was obviously using his character to ridicule the racist "Redskins" material by carrying it to its logical extreme, which is that any offensive behavior is acceptable if it comes with a penitent "foundation."