Look I have been a fan of Bill Maher in the past so I don’t think that he is malicious. However I think that this clip from an interview on CNN this weekend deserves attention. In it, Maher is lamenting the ‘weak’ and ‘wimpy’ Barack Obama. He had hoped two years into the presidency of the first Black man elected to that office to be making jokes about Barack Obama being “gangsta.” He expected more “Suge Knight” and less “Wayne Brady.”

I cannot express more emphatically how incredibly offensive and wrong this comparison to “Gangsters” and “Suge Knight” is. This is a blog about the prison industrial complex and so any conversations about Barack Obama would usually focus on that topic. However please allow me to digress for a couple of minutes to express how racially offensive Maher’s comments are. I believe that his comments represent a strain of an argument that some people who consider themselves progressive have been making. And I want them to stop it and stop it now.

I am not going to bother to address the virulent anti-Obama racism on the right. Most recently Rush Limbaugh called Obama a juvenile delinquent. This type of race baiting is endemic on the right in America. It doesn’t surprise me that Limbaugh would infantilize Barack Obama while associating him with criminality. The Right has made its bones by criminalizing people of color through enacting “tough on crime” measures and invoking “scary” black criminal bogeymen. One only needs to look at the Willie Horton ads that Papa Bush ran in the 80s to understand that this is the Right’s currency. Katheryn K Russell refers to this common belief among some whites in black criminality as the “myth of the criminalblackman.”

I do want to address pointedly and honestly the race-baiting that I am seeing on my side of the political spectrum. Internalized racism is a terrible thing. We all suffer from it. It is so insidious that Black people will find ourselves clutching our own purses more tightly as we walk past young black men on the street. This is undeniable and it is real. The only way to overcome this conditioning is to actively seek to raise our consciousness and to be honest about how pervasive and insidious systemic racism really is. What I witnessed in Bill Maher’s comments was a different type of internalized racism and he should be called on it. I am certain that Maher would consider himself to be anti-racist and yet he has swallowed the same toxic racist sludge that the rest of us have. Racism is inescapable in America.

In fact, America did NOT elect Suge Knight as its president. I have absolutely no problem with the substance of the rest of Maher’s criticism of Barack Obama. He is free to characterize the President as weak, wussy, wimpy, whatever. I don’t care. But I draw the line as a black person at white people getting on national television and promulgating damaging and destructive stereotypes about blackness – equating us with thuggishness and gangsterism. This is supremely unhelpful and makes progressive multi-racial coalition building impossible.

I don’t know if Mr. Maher has any black friends but someone has to pull him aside and lovingly school him on this.

Finally, I wasn’t going to comment on this tonight but I will now that I have lost my sense of humor. Frank Rich published a column today titled: “Obama’s Captors.” In it, he makes the hackneyed point that Obama is being held hostage by the Republican Party and instructs the reader to learn about “Stockholm Syndrome” as a way to understand the President’s mental state. Once again, I really do like Rich as a writer and polemicist. I take no issue with him writing that he wishes this President would adopt a populist tone and implement more populist policies. I do question this emerging “meme” of the Black man in the White House being some sort of prisoner. Does any one else find this in the least bit distressing? Look I am immersed in prison work so perhaps I don’t have any perspective on this matter. But it does strike me as odd to be making the case that the President of the United States is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

Enough for tonight…

Update: Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about this today. Co-sign…