Saturday, April 23, 2016

You Never Go Full Retard, and You Never Go Any Part MLK



Here one of the pro-Trump libertarians, in his infinite naivete--and there was quite a bit of that on the pro-Trump side--tries to talk a Black Lives Matter militant down from the frenzy she's determined to work up by invoking the old "what would MLK think".
Bad move. The young woman, who looks as likely as not to have a white mom back home in Snohomish, doesn't miss a beat, improvising a sound-byte quality lament that could only have been better if she'd broke into tears. I don't doubt she was trying. The reaction of those around was interesting. The whites were kind of reverentially amused, somehow, and you can see the black kids have their own typical obliviously smug reaction.
But watching the girl work herself up self-consciously (I mean whipping off the glasses is great for the broad middlebrow of your audience, but the more discerning critic finds it a bit much) and the reaction of her mates, what we see is a longtime motif of black-white relations, the tendency of blacks to perform for whites in such situations. Blacks performing for whites goes beyond the stage.

Theorists would, probably have, run this through the white privilege shredder as just more oppression but that's a hard sell when you consider Barack Obama essentially performed his way to the presidency in this fashion. But Mr Libertarian deserved it, indulging that hoary cliche. "But I like Martin Luther King!" he protests at some point. Schmuck. The rhetorical subject of MLK is like the so-named boulevard: avoid it if you can.

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