What’s good, Medium? Trevor Noah/Tomi Lahren edition
12/6/2016
By now you’ve probably seen the Daily Show interview between Trevor Noah and the Blaze’s resident White Lady With an Opinion Tomi Lahren. Depending on what your Facebook feed looks like, Tomi DESTROYED Trevor or Trevor SKEWERED Tomi.
Afterward, they both took to Twitter to talk about the need for us all to get out of our “bubbles” and talk to people with “opposing views.”
David Dennis, Jr. thinks white folks were a little too pleased about Lahren’s Daily Show interview. Here’s why:
Lahren and Noah didn’t just have a debate with an equal exchange of ideas. They weren’t debating how to increase GDP or who’s the best team in the NFC. They debated topics that are literally life-threatening to people who look like Trevor Noah and me. Tomi Lahren spouted violent propaganda on national television while Noah tried to get her to value his black life. That’s not a healthy debate. That type of conversation shouldn’t be celebrated. And it damn sure isn’t Trevor Noah’s job to convince a white person why he shouldn’t die.
But to white people, whose lives aren’t in danger in the way Trevor Noah’s is, this was an entertaining joust that reaffirmed whatever stances they have on a multitude of issues and made them feel good about the belief that we can just talk away hatred without doing anything to actually deter it. Andonce again, the onus is placed on the black person to defend himself.
Noah followed up with a Very Polite and Respectable op-ed in the New York Times about how the need for us all to unite and for specifically for those who opposed Trump to “reach out to reason with his supporters.”
Many were not impressed. Some also pointed out that Noah, who lived in South Africa before moving the United Stated five years ago, might not the best person to cite as an expert on American race relations.
Isabelle dany masado points out that the “nuance” Noah calls for in the New York Times seems to be a privilege only afforded to white people:
I wanted so badly to agree with Noah, to side with him in this adamant need to reach across party and ideology lines to try and understand each other. But the problem is that in his article, Trevor divides the labor equally across ideology lines, as if this misunderstanding is merely about whether or not we need a tax hike, and not about whether certain lives are more valuable than others.
This nuance he speaks of, is a luxury that marginalized people have rarely been granted.
Nuance is for Tomi Lahren who despite her denial of the existence of racism, gets to hang out with Trevor and Charlamagne who say they want to talk it out with her, as if racism is a negotiable thing. Where is the nuance is whether or not a group of people deserve to live?
Nuance is a luxury that a cop can afford, in which he walks free despite shooting a black man in the back.
What does nuance looks like when your life has always been one-dimensional and depicted as worthless? What is nuance for many of us?
Lahren continued what TMZ called her “I Have Black Friends Tour” and was by hanging out with Charlagmnge tha God (who, by the way, I have been saying is whack since day one) in Time Square.
Ezinne Ukoha points out that attractive white women are often given passes — or even platforms — for expressing repugnant opinions:
Black women can’t get away with being careless with thoughts and words. We can barely wear our hair in the fashion that it was created. We have to be forward-thinkers and impeccably resolute in our choices — which have to coincide with whatever enterprises we sign up for. We are not given the freedom to allow the wind to sexily mess up our hair and dull the senses that are supposed to save us anytime we are feeling socially mischievous.
No, that honor will always be reserved for White women.
They can be as bad as they wanna be because the world will forgive them and in the process of cutting them a break — there are talk shows to invade and book deals to sift through.
Oh, to be a White woman with the landscape that lays-in-waiting as you high jump through the terrain that flattens to accommodate every landing that usually involves pummeling the ones that are punished for your enhancements.
