White Whining
By: Tim Wise
Tags: Politics, Society, Equality, Culture, Race

Dennis Prager has had enough of racial injustice.

No, not hate crimes against Asian Americans in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.

And no, not the racist policing of New Orleans cops, who have recently been caught conducting illegal searches of black men in the French Quarter and then concocting false stories to justify their actions.

And no, certainly not the disproportionate killing of black folks by police even when the former are unarmed and posing no threat to the officers.

No, none of those. Instead, the conservative moralist-turned-Trumpster and founder of the eponymously named Prager U — which is to a university what a TikTok clip is to the Thriller video — has found an even greater indignity about which to become incensed.

Specifically, Dennis Prager wants us all to know how aggrieved he is at not being allowed to use the terms “colored” or “Negro” to refer to black people.

This, just a few months after he lamented not being able to say the actual n-word, which one suspects is the term he’d prefer to use. Or at least the Yiddish equivalent with which he was no doubt raised, as was the case with virtually any American Jew his age, much like my own father.

To hear Prager tell it, black folks have been switching up their names too often, as if they were conspiring to confuse old white men like himself. To wit, the following kvetch:

“How many names have Blacks gone through in my lifetime? Colored? Negro? African American? Black? Four different titles for the same human being.”

I mean seriously, how uppity can one group be, thinking itself worthy of four names? Especially when people like Dennis Prager only have one: assholes.

Prager notes — because white conservatives think this is an important point — that “The NAACP is still the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Get it? If whites can’t use ‘colored’ to refer to black folks, we are the victims of oppressive, politically correct hypocrisy, so long as the NAACP refuses to change its name. Sure, because a revered civil rights group that chose that name more than a century ago, and sees value in historical continuity as a way to honor that legacy, is the real source of the problem.

Let’s just say that if Prager U were an actual school, as opposed to an overproduced YouTube channel, history would not be a very popular major. Nor would logic be offered, even as a minor.

“What was wrong with colored?” he asks, or even Negro? Then, answering his own question (because it wasn’t a question, but rather, a statement of white linguistic entitlement), he exclaims, “There’s no problem with any of them.”

Of course not, because Dennis Prager says so, and that’s what matters.

The fact that black folks have a problem with such terms — in large part because they were not self-chosen but imposed by whites, unlike black or African American — is of no consequence. And honestly, if we let them pick their own names, and God forbid change them to reflect modern sensibilities, what might they demand next? The right not to be chased down and murdered by truck-driving vigilantes?

Ultimately, what grates on Prager and other white reactionaries is black self-determination: the right of black peoples to define their truth, and to stand in that truth without apology. Allowing such autonomy invites a challenge to far more than just the names by which a group has been referred. It creates space to challenge the narrative of America that the Dennis Pragers of the world prefer and upon which their entire self-concept depends.

The history of America (and it’s one Prager would rather lie about than confront openly) is one in which white people policed the borders of black freedom. We got to name them — hell, we were allowed to own them — and then to place formal limitations upon their mobility, as well as their access to education, work, and housing, well into the lifetime of Dennis Prager.

And those words with which Dennis Prager sees no problem? Up until he was a teenager, those words were placed above water fountains and bathrooms and on signs pointing to movie theatre balconies and store entrances. They were symbols of marginalization and oppression, like the yellow stars placed on Jews in Germany.

For Dennis Prager to bristle at black resistance to that history, and the right of black people to tell their own stories, and demand we listen to them just as they had to listen to ours — or simply choose the name by which they would prefer to be called — is the ultimate racist move.

Oh and yes, I know — because it’s the old standby to which all the Dennis Pragers of the world retreat — black people use the n-word with each other and rappers use it. So “why can’t we?” That such stupidity is so often vomited into the world by white people who think it the ultimate argumentative trump card (no pun intended), goes to show how incredibly ignorant giant vats of mayonnaise can be.

Listen, white people can say it. Go ahead, Pillsbury. Free speech and all. But when you do, the rest of us get to use our free speech to call you a racist asshat. Because if you know that’s how black folks feel about your use of it and yet, you still use it, that’s what you are.

And yes, Miracle Whip, for white folks to use the word is different than black folks using it, or a slightly different form of it, ending with the letter ‘a.’ That word has no mixed history in the mouths of white people. Regardless of whether black folks ultimately decide to use it amongst themselves, it was never deployed as a term of endearment by whites.

Although there is no slur as historically offensive as the n-word, the difference between its use by whites and blacks is similar to the difference between Jeff Foxworthy telling 20 minutes of redneck jokes and Sarah Silverman doing so. It’s like the difference between Jewish comics making a living telling Jewish jokes on the borscht belt circuit in the mid-twentieth century and seeing the same Jewish jokes in the Baptist church bulletin. Jackie Mason (oy gevalt) is in the family. Youth Pastor Trevor is not.

Or even simpler, it’s third-grade wisdom: I can talk about my momma, but you sure as shit can’t talk about my momma.

That Dennis Prager is a 72-year-old man who still hasn’t learned this lesson — one that pretty much any eight-year-old knows — or who learned it but doesn’t care enough to apply it here is telling.

And the fact that Dennis Prager can fancy himself oppressed because he can’t get away with using offensive terms for black people — even as he refers to liberals and leftists as snowflakes — is the kind of psychological projection that keeps therapists in business.

He’s like the pus calling the maggot white, and in more ways than one.