The all powerful Radley Balko has been partially credited with Ted Rall’s firing from the New York Times website – by Ted Rall himself. Or something like that – for a short posting he made in October of 2002 suggesting that Yahoo! drop Rall’s column.
Welcome to my world, Radley. In 1998, with a penchant for self torture, I called for newspapers to drop Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks column after a series of strips which mocked self-identifying multiracial individuals as “confused” and running from their “blackness.” Did I really expect the strip to get dropped? No. I was sending a message and adopting the tired ass tactics of many of my critics on both the left and the right. Apparently, McGruder got the message, because its been years since he’s touched that plot in the strip and he’s even mentioned the infamous press release in some of his campus appearances over the years as proof of some plot to get him. That – and probably the fact that it got mentioned in a National Journal story and other publications had an effect. Or perhaps I’m delusional and full of myself.
Probably the latter.
For several months following that press release, my inbox was full of entertaining hate mail, often from a barely literate, frothing at the mouth rainbow coalition of jackasses conveying threats or endorsements of the one-drop rule and anti-miscegenation laws. Of course, my all time favorite was a series of emails form one individual who accused me of being jealous of McGruder’s success as an comic strip author. Yeah, I’m just another disgruntled, failed comic strip wannabe. Cute stuff.
Then, of course, there were the delusional emails that claimed that any criticism of any “black” person is bona fide “racism.” As if the right to criticize should be subject to some sort of skin color shielding. Aside from that concept being completely nonsensical, it conveys a condescension on the part of the individual promoting such an idea. Also, wouldn’t this mean that I couldn’t fight with my “black” wife? Don’t give her any ideas – she can take of herself. In short, such a ridiculous claim implies that “black” public figures should somehow be immune to criticism by sheer accident of birth or that they somehow lack the faculties necessary to deal with public scrutiny. This is, in my opinion, covert “racism” on the part of the individual promoting such nonsense. It implies that they view “black” individuals as somehow inferior and in need of protection from criticism, lest their feelings be hurt. This is usually peddled by the same liberals who secretly harbor anti-miscegenationist beliefs, out of fear of what intermarriage is doing to the “black” community and a bizarre sense of solidarity with “black” nationalists and neo-segregationist extremists who cloak their throwback views under phrases like “cultural integrity” and preserving the “beautiful mosaic.”
Anyway, back to the point. Anyone and everyone who puts an idea out in the public sphere is willfully exposing themselves to possible criticism. I’ve been called more names and threatened more times than I care to count – from “white” supremacists, “black” nationalists, and mouth-breathing troglodytes of all types for several years now.
I’m still here, and still breathing fire.
To claim, as some of my critics have, that skin color should limit a person’s exposure to criticism is the ultimate insult to the sacrifices of those who suffered and/or died in the struggle to defeat slavery and later, the Jim Crow policies of the last century. Its condescending and “racist.”
And it isn’t progress. And by the way, I still read The Boondocks with my wife on Sunday mornings. And occasionally, I even crack a smile while doing so – evil though I be.