This speaks to a central meaning of Larry Wilmore and Barack Obama’s final exchange on Saturday night. Each has been used as a political weapon, as a “term of endearment” and/or as an epithet, sometimes at the same time by different communities. “ All of these names were externally imposed labels for management and exploitation and have been reimagined and repurposed, according to time, place and manner, by communities forced to wear them. In other words, nigger is an adjectival riff on “Negro,” “Black,” “Colored,” even in many ways, even “African. You go up to the average Black man and ask him what a nigger is and he’ll hem and haw, but he’ll probably say it’s an offensive term for Negro, if he don’t misunderstand you first and go upside your head.” It’s a simple law of nature that most people have forgotten.
If another man can give you a name and you go by it, then that man owns you. He writes, “to the White man, a Negro is a nigger. The writer Henry Dumas the slur in its proper context in his short story, The Bewitching Bag, or How the Man Escaped from Hell. The word and its externally-imposed definition shares common parentage in the White racial imaginary with its diasporan cousins: Kaffir.
#Barry wilmore strange story code#
The word “nigger” is part of the genetic code of Black American identity that binds all three comedic spheres together. In the other directional sphere lies a circle of Black comedians from Redd Foxx to Millie Jackson to Robin Harris that gives self-celebratory and at once self-critical succor to Black public spheres. Murphy follows largely in the Cosby posture, his profane disposition, faux Oedipal feigns and Cosby’s late inward political turns notwithstanding. The living paterfamilias is Dick Gregory, who sat counsel over a private and uncensored gathering of his juniors after last October’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which was awarded to Eddie Murphy.īeyond this center of Black comedic irony in one direction of the diagram are Black comedians who “transcend race,” whose standard bearer was, unfairly and inaccurately for those familiar with his entire body of work, Cosby. The heir apparent to the genealogy probably continues to be Dave Chappelle. The patron saint of this brood, and arguably the finest Black comedian to practice the art, remains Richard Pryor. Wilmore and Bell occupy the overlapping center of a collage of Black American comedy that includes a cluster of masters of racial irony such as Bert Williams, Moms Mabley, Godfrey Cambridge and Paul Mooney, to name a few. Kamau Bell, a long-time performer and the latest entrant into CNN’s fascination with the trope of non-Whiteness, to the sharp-toned Hannibal Burress, whose controversial mockery of Bill Cosby put him on the comedy fast track. Wilmore has emerged as one of the more prominent Black public race translator comedians in the “Age of Obama.” Members of this group are frequently characterized as “pushing the envelope” on racial topics with easy smiles and semi-mock righteous indignation. You did it.”Ī cascade of reactions could have been expected. President, Im’a keep it a hundred: Yo Barry: You did it, my nigga.
#Barry wilmore strange story full#
In full view of the non-Black public, Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show host mixed his trademark dash of “authenticity” in satire into the fragrant stew of private Black desire and public Black defiance that, more than anything else, will define what some have labeled the “Black Presidency.” A clearly rattled live audience was still chewing on Wilmore’s (and prior to that, Obama’s) barrage of send-ups of race-obsessed critics when Wilmore declared to a smiling Obama, “So, Mr. At Saturday’s annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, guest host Larry Wilmore ended his high octane extended riff on race, politics and President Obama by spraying a local and international audience with the verbal accelerant of a shopworn valedictory among Black American men.