Just when you think the Republican candidate for President can’t sink any lower on the depths of objective human decency, along comes a performance like the one he offered up yesterday that reminds you that he most certainly can.
As no less than FOUR Reuters journalists–Bianca Flowers, Trevor Hunnicutt, Nathan Layne and Nandita Bose gang-reported:
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump falsely suggested to the country’s largest annual gathering of Black journalists on Wednesday that his Democratic rival Kamala Harris had previously downplayed her Black heritage.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said, drawing a smattering of jeers from an audience of about 1,000 people.
“So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? Trump continued. “But you know what, I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person.”
Naturally, such remarks at an otherwise mundane campaign stop achieved what is ultimately the primary goal of seemingly anyone with any goals these days–provoke responses and conversation and force anyone paying attention to at least acknowledge their own feelings.
And high on my personal list of uncomfortable truths is the fact that a little remembered reality series nearly two decades ago taught me that even the most liberal and high-minded of us have those feelings and, whether we like it or not, they factor into how and why we make the choices that we do.
At the time, FX was achieving modest ratings success and critical acclaim with one of its first significant unscripted efforts, Morgan Spurlock’s 30 DAYS, which featured subjects immersing themselves in worlds that fell way out of their comfort zones for a month. Among the first batch were ones featuring two different devout Christians, one living among Muslims and one living with a gay roommate in San Francisco’s progressive Castro district. They were provocative experiments, and it had our team thinking, as is always the case when one gets a taste of relative success, what’s the next step?
Along came another innovative unscripted auteur, R.J. Cutler, who was partnered with none other than Ice Cube. His concept was indeed provocative, as Wikipedia reminds:
Black. White…documented two voluntary families of three, one white, and the other black, in which through studio-quality make-up, the two families would give off a facade appearance, of portraying a race that isn’t their own, for social experiment purposes.
At a time when the pressure from above to control costs that had escalated beyond expectations in the wake of the three-for-three rollout of the network’s first significant scripted efforts–THE SHIELD, NIP/TUCK and RESCUE ME–both the intrigue and the cost-efficiency drove the swift greenlighting of the series without a pilot. And while under such circumstances there was little need to test the show for audience reactions, our marketing team, knowing the sensitivity levels for this could approach Defcon 5, did want to know what the hot buttons and pain points might be. In order to get context for their print ads and promos the first episode that set up the above premise needed to be shown.
We carefully and strategically selected what we considered to be “tinderbox” markets to get our feedback. They also happened to be two relatively high-rated ones as well. So into Detroit and Memphis we strutted. Making extra sure we balanced our test groups as much as possible with statistically accurate representations of race, income and political leanings. We even hired a Black moderator for half of the groups in order to mitigate what some may have seen as a potential variable in our findings (even though such a belief was no more grounded in reality than much of which was espoused on Wednesday).
What I saw unfold was unsettling and has stuck with me even this many years later. The episode was met with outright derision by our Black respondents. “Is this some kind of a joke?”, we heard. “How could anyone think that they could get a real handle on what it’s like to be white simply by playing dress-up?”. And the white respondents, particularly in Memphis, responded best to the more over-the-top elements, such as the daughter of the white family injecting herself into a slam poetry competition. The more sobering moments, such as when the families sit down and try to get to know other in preparation for what lied ahead, was dismissed as “something that would be best on an episode of MAURY”.
The critical reaction to this was at best mixed, nowhere near the level of accolade that 30 DAYS provoked. The most cynical, but at the time one of the most impactful, came from Robert Bianco of USA TODAY, as Wiki again recounts:
“The show is being sold on the race-switch trick, but tonight’s premiere is built around a far more mundane stunt: putting people you know won’t get along into close-quarter situations designed to exacerbate the inevitable conflicts…Black. White. is based on two false premises, one more pernicious than the other: that you can understand someone of a different race simply by putting on makeup, and that you need that kind of understanding in order to treat people as the law and morality require.”
It came as no surprise that even premiere ratings were modest, and the decline in ensuing weeks was precipitious. And no markets saw steeper declines than did Detroit and Memphis. We decided to cut our losses and truncate the six-week arc into five and get out early with a two-hour finale that turned out to be the last time the show ever aired on FX.
There’s been a lot of Thursday morning quarterbacking as to why Trump was even given the opportunity to speak at such a conclave. As the REUTERS quartet reported, (t)he invitation to Trump to attend the event triggered a backlash among some members of the NABJ and prompted a co-chair of the convention to step down in protest this week. The back-and-forth between him and ABC NEWS’ Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott, as reported by her network, was especially click-batable and incideniary; judge for yourself if you have not yet seen it.
I’ve been seeing plenty of vitriol and derision from many who have taken personal offense to what went down. Few were as direct as the remarks Harris herself delivered last night in front of the second historically Black sorority audience she has addressed since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee:
(H)is remarks were “yet another reminder” of what the four years under the former president looked like. “It was the same old show of divisiveness and disrespect,” Harris said. “The American people deserve better.”
Perhaps they do. But as I learned from those test audiences, they just might not want it.
Until next time…
1 thought on “It DOES Matter If You’re Black Or White”
I was pleased (not really “pleased”, but glad you stay true to form) to see you, the rest of the Democrat party and your Lord Barackkk’s (pbuh) pals in Iran all want the same thing. A dead President Trump. And for good measure…….dead Jews.
Better luck next time, Am I right?
Will you offer yourself as a sacrifice to appease the muslims? HT* Harris needs dead Jews…..and LOTS OF THEM……(and certainly not a Jew VP) in order to earn the terrorist vote back to the (D)s, that gave Joe (at the time) the big muslim finger.
The world is SO MUCH SAFER now, don’t you think?
Noah
PS Work will NOT set you free!! Stay off the trains!
* Hawk Tuah (I just looked that up!! It’s a hoot, isn’t it)