M-M-M

James Taranto writes:

[Dave] Weigel has a curious post titled "Megyn Kelly's Minstrel Show," the gist of which is that Fox News Channel pays too much attention to the New Black Panther Party. The inspiration for the post is a much-circulated video depicting a Kelly interview with Kirsten Powers, a liberal Fox News contributor, which quickly turns into a shouting match.

After quoting Weigel's description, he continues...

Weigel reports that a Nexis search finds at least 35 Fox News Channel appearances by the New Black Panther Party's Malik Zulu Shabazz in which Shabazz is usually "brought on to act as a foolish, anti-Semitic punching bag." (MediaMutters.org puts the count at 51, though it includes other NBPP representatives as well.) As an example, Weigel cites a 2008 interview with Sean Hannity in which Hannity asked Shabazz for his views on Jeremiah Wright, then-Sen. Barack Obama's America-hating then-pastor.

"This isn't journalism," Weigel opines about the Hannity interview. "No one cares what the NBPP thinks about anything. This is minstrelsy, with a fringe moron set up like a bowling pin for Hannity to knock down." [my emphasis]

 More Taranto...

Further, Weigel's invocation of "minstrelsy" rankles. The headline's reference to "Megyn Kelly's Minstrel Show" seems completely out of place, since neither Kelly nor Powers (nor an unidentified brunette who makes a cameo) is wearing blackface. Now maybe Weigel didn't write the headline and meant only to suggest, as he does in the text, that Shabazz, in the Hannity interview, was acting as a minstrel.

Which reminded us of an April column by the New York Times's Charles Blow, in which he describes a Tea Party rally in Dallas that featured "a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism" and a black comic who "performs skits as 'Zo-bama,' " Blow summed his impressions up this way:

Thursday night I saw a political minstrel show devised for the entertainment of those on the rim of obliviousness and for those engaged in the subterfuge of intolerance. I was not amused.

Liberals have different reasons for wanting to diminish black conservatives and black supremacists. By doing so in both cases using a label, "minstrel," that has implications of black inferiority, they belie their own professed belief in racial equality.

Taranto's observation that [many?] liberals want to diminish both black conservatives and black supremacists. To do so they invoke a term, minstrel, that invokes generic inferiority, which, the writer notes, contradicts the racial equality they profess.


Another strange loop, indeed.


The embarrassing phase of black-face in Thirties/Forties musicals invoked a strange loop as well. Typically, African-American actors, singers, or dancers, did not appear as peers of the principal characters. But a Fred Astaire or a Bing Crosby might appear in black-face. Judy and Mickey could appear in their own version of a minstrel piece. (e.g. link); Critics quite legitimately bemoan the effect such discrimination had on such talents as Lena Horne. The policy seemed to be: no realistic black characters, but principal actors could take on a black facade.


Update (7/16/2010):
Matt Labash, in a review of another version of liberalism for dummies quotes Mencken:  “Liberals have many tails, and chase them all.” (According to Google, Mencken wrote this in American Mercury, Jan-Jun, 1924, p. 505.)