Why I stopped watching Jon Stewart and why you Should too

Jon Stewart was and is an incredibly influential television personality. He and his show have done great things. Watch his Indecision 2000 coverage. Watch his 9/11 show. 10 Years ago, he was one of the few voices on the television that had the audacity to question, or even make fun of those in power from behind a desk with a camera pointed at him. When TDS was at it's peak was a time when people like Phil Donnahue was run out of town for having guests on his show that were speaking out against the war as part of a general discussion about war. What Jon Stewart did took courage. He was smart, and made people laugh while he did it. He was the court jester when people were confused and scared and angry. He didn't just say the emperor had no clothes. He joked about how everybody knew the emperor had no clothes. He was responsible for so many people hearing another point of view for the first time, and some of those people went on to do other great things.

Since then, steady decline. Yes, there have been flashes of brilliance. When he went on to Tucker Carlson's show and ripped him apart, he effectively crushed that terrible show. He destroyed Jim Kramer's credibility, and has had many other terrible people onto his show to destroy them (Dick Army, et all). He helped create Stephen Colbert, and we all saw Colbert redefine satire at a White House Correspondents Dinner. Flashes in a sea of banality.

What we have seen is a drift from a satirical jester to a news reporter that will throw his hands up if anyone even suggests that he is a news figure, even when countless surveys put him at the top of the most trusted name in news. Just because he is joking about the news, doesn't mean he is not reporting on it.

Still, why not watch?

At best Jon Stewart the persona is a hack. At worst, it is just another elitist, misogynistic, center-right pundit.

Watch him talking about the Dr. Laura incident. He actually uses the n word on air. He can barely choke it out. He knows that what he is doing isn't funny. It's just terrible. His show isn't live, and I am sure he saw the script before hand. Why leave it in there at all? Is it because he thinks that everything can be a joke? Is satire the most important thing? Why?

Watch him respond to the Jezebel allegations of his sexism. Watch him totally miss the point. He reframes the accusations, just like every other elitist, privilege-denying person would do.

Look at his Rally to Promote Apathy. Over one hundred thousand people attended. 4 days before an election. The rally's general message was that everyone should calm down and have civil discussions and being passionate is stupid. Kids are starving. People are broke. Gays are killing themselves because they have no hope for anything ever being anything but hopeless. Rational people are terrified and watching everything their family has worked for vanish. Crossing your arms and saying that you shouldn’t talk about these things until everyone calms down is pretty much derailment 101.

Look at his closing speech to the Rally. It destroys the whole premise that the event wasn't political. You can't close a non-political event with a political speech and then tell people that they just didn't get it.

Even after all this, I still watched Jon Stewart and TDS. I wasn't an avid watcher, but I still tried to keep up with it.

Look at his interview with Rachel Maddow. He says that Bush is technically a war criminal, but we shouldn't deal with that because to call him one is a "conversation stopper, not a conversation stopper". He does that whole semantic hair splitting dance of the "I'm always right" crowd by saying that Fox News isn't partisan. He lambasts Code Pink for partaking in direct activism. Yes, Code Pink does some pretty asinine things. I don't really see how wearing a bloody shirt to a congressional hearing accomplishes very much, but he compares them directly to the faux grassroots activism that results in people getting their heads stomped on. What is even worse is that he is projecting the fringe, flashy actions of a group and totally ignoring everything they have done for soldiers wives. It's only a few logical steps from decrying all environmentalists are eco terrorists because the ELF is an environmentalist group.

Jon Stewart is so out of touch with reality that his glib writers and his hilarious delivery don't make up for it anymore, and there is no reason for me to watch anymore. I used to watch him, get some information, and have a laugh about it, but there are better places to get news, and funnier satirist out there. I don't even blame him. He's been doing this for over ten years, and nothing has changed.

Apathetic Activism starts out with a pathetic act

Recently, Salon posted and article about how “Facebook made [her] an activist”. I would say that Face book (and Twitter and most social media) has lowered the bar for the definition of activism.

Social media in general has done a lot to spread information, spur debate, and help (real) activists coordinate their efforts. I am not saying that it is all bad. I am saying that it is mostly bad.

Americans, by and large, are lazy, fat (in every sense of the word), procrastinators that have perfected the art of being lonely together. If one could ask us all at once what the definition of us was and what we stood for, the response would be a cacophony of blubbery sighs, stupid Family Guy jokes, and old movie quotes until it eventually died down and we settled on “whatever the last generation was but, you know, like, uh better, like philosophy two-point-oh but with more (faux) ironic sarcasm”.

It is no surprise that Social Media has allowed the Haves of America to perfect the art of Slacktivism. People click a button to somehow donate rice to some people in some other country SPONSORED BY CORPORATION and automatically display it prominently so everyone can see how “involved” they really are, or as if that wasn’t pathetic enough, change their profile pictures to show solidarity for whatever cause is trendy at the time because it is literally the least they could do while circle-jerking and trying to prove they have accomplished something.

What is worse? People going on a fucking vacation to “help” whatever tropical place had something recently terrible happen to it. Demanding that someone shelter them and feed them and acclimate them and waste enough time and resources as possible just before packing up, going home, and positing pictures all over the place talking about how it touched them and how it was just so sad.

None of this is activism.

Someday, I hope to become a real activist. You can fucking bet that it’s not going to involve retweets and hash tags.

Expanding the focus of this blog

Hey, three readers. I just wanted to say that this blog needs more activity. I am going to expand it's focus from just anti-racism to anti-racism and progressive politics. With this expanded focus I should be able to make three posts per week.


Also, I had to turn on comment moderation because I tried to argue about race on the Internet, and a bunch of idiots came a long and made asinine comments. I will never reject a serious comment.


Speaking of comments, for some reason, some comments were caught up in the automated anti spam software. I have disabled that. If you do post a comment, and it doesn't show up right away, please email me cynnik@gmail.com and bother me about it. I am going to work on a general commenting guideline page this week as well.


If you would like to contribute to this, please let me know. I can set up you up with a regular account and you can post away, or if you'd prefer to contribute a one-off, I am fine with that as well.


-Ken

The Little Things

The hardest things for me to understand as I began to truly understand what white privilege were the little things. Sure, it was easy for me to just ‘get’ a lot of it. Don’t use the N word. Referring to people of color as colored people, despite my conditioning, is ok. The basic, clear cut stuff was easy to understand, even though perhaps I had never articulated these ideals, they fell under my general idea of what racism/sexism was, and it was easy for me to adopt them if necessary.

Here are some of the things that I have been recently told that I was doing or how I was being:

“You require everyone you interact with to think the same way you do. If they don’t, you refuse to interact with them”

First, this is partially true as it is with literally everyone.  You need some sort of common ground intellectually to interact with people, but that’s not what this particular discussion is about.

There have been people in my life that I have chosen to no longer have in my life, not because they mirror my thoughts and opinions, but have offended me personally and have not, at my request, at the very least not say that garbage near me. People I know and interact with say terrible things from time to time, but will not say these types of things around me when I ask them not to, because it offends me. The conversation could end right there, they can easily say: “I am sorry that you were offended by what I said. I will try not to offend you in the future.”

By saying this, the person who offended me doesn’t have to admit fault, and gives them an out if they happen to say something else offensive to me. This is really all that I would require to maintain even the most basic relationship with a person (Depending on what was said, of course). Sure, the conversation can turn into something where the offender asks why, and I explain why/how I feel, and we all hold hands and skip off into the sunset, but this is not a requirement, and I expect it would rarely happen.

No one is saying that you don’t have the right to have your own opinion, and you don’t have the right to express it. I have the right to ask you to stop, and I have the right to call you an idiot, and I have the right to never talk to you again.

“You and I have the same overall goal, but we choose to use different tactics to achieve this goal”

Here is a tactical argument I am willing to discuss: Self Love vs. We’re Just Like You in terms of overall effectiveness and how quickly milestones can be reached.

Here is a ‘tactical’ argument that I am not willing to discuss: If white people use the N word, it takes away the strength of the word!

By saying that you and I are fighting to reach the same goal, but are using different tactics, you aren’t really addressing the problem, just reinforcing it because you are taking the stance that you aren’t wrong, that you can’t be wrong, and at best we are both right. It’s important, especially when you are on the side of privilege, to be ready and willing to admit you might be wrong.

“You are misinterpreting what I said”

This can happen. Sometimes people can use words incorrectly, or use the incorrect word and it can change the whole meaning of what was said.

More often, I have seen people use this to defend something that I took offense to. It can suck for someone to hear something that they have said offended people. I can remember tying to explain my way out of something like that before.

What I didn’t grasp is that just because I said something that was insensitive, it doesn’t necessarily make me a racist. This is an important thing to understand.

“You have no intellectual standards in your argument”

Fuck you. We aren’t talking about which Back to the Future movie is the best (It’s II).

It’s important that people just begin to listen and understand. It’s the only way to move forward.

White Defensiveness

In my last entry, I talked a little bit about how many people who belong to the privileged class (in this case white people) can get defensive or even outright aggressive when the subject turns to racism and privilege. What I'd like to do is look at and refute some of these reactions that I've encountered. These are all based on my experiences; if you've got any experiences you'd like to share, please do! And with that, here we go.


"How can you say all white people are privileged? Aren't there poor white people? Aren't there rich minorities?"
This is one I've heard a good few times, and really underlines the difficulties with using the term privilege. For a lot of people, when they hear privilege, they immediately think of it in terms of class, and in that case it's difficult to accept the suggestion that white people are privileged when there's no shortage of white people who are lower class or impoverished. However, comparing a wealthy person of color to a working class white person isn't really a fair comparison when looking at the issue of racial privilege. An easy way to think of it is like this: imagine a working class white person and a working class person of color. They both will have issues that they need to deal with that arise from their class. However, the person of color must deal with other issues that arise from their race, such as reduced job opportunities or differential treatment by law enforcement as some examples. Racial privilege refers to the fact that the white person does not have to deal with these, or that if they do they can be reasonably sure that their race was not a factor.


"Why are we paying so much attention to race? If we just let all this be, it would resolve itself. We're only making it worse by bringing race up all the time."


It should be pretty obvious what's wrong with this viewpoint. Ignoring problems, especially racism, does not make them go away. At best things stay the same, but what's more likely is that things manage to get even worse because this attitude breeds a sense of complacency and "it can't happen here!" regarding all but the most blatant examples of racism.


This kind of viewpoint really demonstrates privileged thinking; a white person can say "oh let's just ignore all this talk about race and be colorblind" because if they do, they are not harmed by it. In North American society, there is no ingrained instiutional racism towards white people that needs to be addressed. They can suggest that race should not ever be brought into the discussion because they are not the ones who directly suffer from institutional racism's continuation.


Anything that uses the phrase "white guilt" or anything along the lines of "Sorry for being white!"
Now here's one I'm sure we've all heard before, and around this point we're getting out of the territory of uninformed and into the territory of casually racist jerkwad. Here the implication is that the goal of anti-racism is to make white people feel bad for no other reason than being born white, and so this gem gets whipped out as a shaming technique. When used against a white anti-racist, it implies that they are somehow ashamed of their own background or a race traitor of sorts who wants to score brownie points with people of color by feeling bad. When used against a person of color, it's an effect similar to the one I talked about with the attempt to make the term "racist" into a slur. It attempts to paint the person of color as an aggressor, and as the true racist.
Here's the thing though. I couldn't care less if white people felt guilty or not. If they do, that's their perogative, but it doesn't accomplish anything. What I want is not to have my experiences with racism denied or written off as oversensitivity. What I want is an acknowledgment of the effects of institutional racism, and for people to speak out against it. What I want is to not be expected to bite my tongue when people start spouting out casual racist bullshit about how my race are a bunch of lazy alcoholics who have the government as their personal genie, and not to be told "I'm one of the good ones" as if I should feel so fucking honored that a white person considers me acceptable and as if it makes the rest of what they said not racist. If you view that as me just wanting to make you feel bad as a white person, then that says a lot more about you than me. As anti-racists, we're not telling you this stuff to be jerks, but because it's a serious issue that should matter to you; don't take it personally.

"But I have a (insert race here) friend who's okay with me saying stuff like that!"
Let me clarify this one for a moment. I'm not referring to the case where someone tries to act like they have a free pass to say racist things because they know people of color (and I'm willing to bet that half the time it's not even true.) We all know that's a load of crap, and why it's a load of crap. What I'm referring to are the people who get caught saying racially insensitive things or making racist jokes and try to explain it away by saying that they have a friend of that race who they can say that around without them getting offended. Listen, everyone has their own boundaries regarding that sort of thing. Yes, some people of color have friends where they will exchange barbs about race as just part of the whole friends ripping on each other deal.

However, just because it's cool within your circle of friends, where you know each other well and have a certain level of comfort around each other, that doesn't mean it's cool outside your circle of friends. For example, just because your black friend is cool with you, his white best buddy making the occasional racist joke, that doesn't mean that another black person who isn't your friend will be or that your black friend will be cool if a white person who isn't your friend says those kinds of things. Even then, don't write off the possibility that they're tolerating it for the sake of keeping the peace; I've been there before, and it's a shitty situation. But even assuming that's the case, think of it this way: You wouldn't think it's okay to talk to a stranger the same way you would when you're playfully trash talking your friends when it comes to non-racialized insults, so you sure as hell shouldn't think it's okay when it comes to racialized trash talk.
"You just can't handle different opinions!"
There's few ways of handwaving racism that piss me off as much as this one. "Being racist is just an opinion! What kind of uptight jerkwad do you have to be to have a problem with differing opinions?"

I'm gonna spell this out real clear. Having a racist opinion is not on the same level as "oh you like chocolate ice cream but I like vanilla, oh well, live and let live" regardless of whatever attempt to trivialize it as such and it takes a lot of privilege to even try it. Having a racist opinion means thinking less of someone and doing harm to them because they aren't the right color. It is not an opinion worthy of respect, and people who hold those opinions are not worthy of respect either. Which leads into...
"So much for tolerance - you're intolerant of my bigotry!"
When you're dealing with someone who pulls this gem out, there's no more doubt that maybe you're just dealing with someone who's ignorant; they're a full blown racist regardless of whatever denials they try to put forth. This is an attempt to paint themselves, the bigot, as the victim in all this. Why, for all your talk of tolerance, you're being prejudiced towards them! The poor little racist who never did any harm to anybody!

My response to this? Guilty as charged. I am intolerant of intolerance, and I think to not be is an act of cowardice. When you willfully throw yourself in to bigotry and racial hatred, you are supporting the harm and dehumanization of people of color. The proper response to people like this is to call them out and oppose them whenever they want to spew their crap. Expose them for what they are to mutual friends, employers, and social groups, and to ostracize them. If we don't want racism to be acceptable, we all need to treat it as unacceptable.

"Deleted" comments

Hey, real quick, it looks like some comments on this blog have gone missing.


I have not intentionally deleted any comments, but what probably happened is that I suck at the internet and while messing with formatting of particular posts, may have stripped comments away somehow.


I will state right now that I will never remove any comment, nor will I edit any comment for it's content.


So, yeah, sorry if it looked like I did.

Pious Ideologues

Recently, I was in an argument on the internet, in a thread called Black Power and the Rhetoric of Modern Racism, where deep deep into the 5 page repeating argument about white privilege, someone decided to send a message to me:

“Reading your blog has been just another reminder that people like you are not to be taken seriously. It was foolish of me to even post in that thread and to reply to you where everyone could see what we had to say to each other.

Pious ideologues like you will be ignored, not just by me, but by the silent majority of all people of all skin color who know better than to be suckered into an outdated culture war. Blather on about "white people black people doo doo doo" all you want, maybe even convert a few gullible idiots. But you are irrelevant.”

While this was going on, a very public argument broke out on my personal Facebook account that ended up with me dissolving a friendship.

These two incidents are what I have had the hardest time learning how to deal with. On one hand, you have a mostly anonymous web site with people all over the map in terms of their views and opinions, and on the other, a very public, open place where people as close to me as my own family can plainly see.

In the anonymous argument, I was fierce, and intensely arguing against those with racist views, openly mocking some of them. I was also openly trying to educate people that seemed like they wanted to learn more, and encouraging them to continue to learn. All this was going on, and I still was making allies, and even rustling up one contributor to this very blog. (Aaron)

Arguing over the internet is something that has come very easy to me, a self important douchebag that can type fast.

It was almost fun to call idiots out on their idiocy in this argument, and have other allies rally around and make pariahs out of these idiots.

There have been other times, however, when on things where people know my name, I have done worse things remaining silent. I have shut down threads when they got out of hand, and even worse than that- I have sent private messages to people that undermined the people that are dear to me.

Why? Why would I do this? Why was I so afraid?

It was because I had to face these people. If one of the people I told off told me to fuck off, I would have to really deal with that rather than simply move on to something else on the Internet. If I spoke up, I could have been faced with the very real possibility of having to dissolve a personal relationship I had built up over time over this one thing.

It not a little thing, and it's not easy to let things go and move on. But then you realize that it's not your fault, and you are better off. Who knows? It might be the wake up call they need to finally start listening and start learning.