The Daily Caller’s alphabetical tour de force showing that absolutely everything is racist is about 70 percent complete and, today, it rolls inexorably onward.
Here are 11 things beginning with the letter “S” that someone, somewhere has deemed racist.
Scrutinizing President Barack Obama is racist, according to MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews, because, Matthews claims, the president’s political opponents “assume evil on the part of Obama.” In the 2013 segment recorded for posterity by MRC TV, Matthews then says, “I mean he’s raised Isla. … His whole life has been crystal clear and clean as a whistle” including “excellent education” and “the pro bono work he’s done.” “He’s never done anything wrong in his life — legally, ethically, whatever.” “I just gotta believe it’s ethnic with these people,” Matthews concludes, after a multitude of frenetic body motions.
MSNBC also called media coverage of selfies racist and sexist while trying to explain away the selfie President Obama took during a December 2013 memorial service for Nelson Mandela. The famous cell phone photo included Obama along with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Helle Thorning Schmidt, Denmark’s prime minister. Photos of the utterly vain incident also show Michelle Obama, off to the side, looking particularly displeased. MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon said media coverage of the selfie moment was a “confluence of racist and sexist stereotypes,” according to Mediaite. Carmon said the whole thing made Obama look “oversexed.” She was also very irate that anyone would publish an image of the first lady looking unhappy. Doing so, Carmon suggested, perpetuates an “angry black woman” stereotype.
In May, Native American leaders in the state of North Dakota called on the University of North Dakota to take swift, harsh disciplinary action against a handful of students who wore vaguely insensitive T-shirts during during a spring party at a public park near campus. The shirts read Siouxper drunk and depicted “the Fighting Sioux,” which was once the official mascot of UND sports teams but has been officially banned since 2012. School spokesman Peter Johnson described the shirts as clearly “offensive and racist,” and promised that the university would do a better job of educating students about “sensitivity issues” in the future. (RELATED: Should UND Expel Students For Wearing Shirts That Offended Sioux Tribe?)
In March 2014, the AFL–CIO, the largest federation of unions in the United States, suggested that sick days are racist because Hispanics — and people who earn less than $20,000 each year — are less likely than other workers to get paid for days off due to illness. “It’s also notable that only 24% of food preparation and service workers have access to paid sick days, despite the fact that most health departments recommend that these workers not go to work sick.” The union organization does not name the companies that force workers to come to work sick because such companies don’t seem to exist. Instead, the AFL–CIO is referring to “paid sick days,” which would allow employees to get paid when they don’t show up for work.
Also in March 2014, Jesse Jackson announced that he would head a delegation to the annual shareholders meeting of Hewlett-Packard to draw attention to the low percentage of black and Hispanic workers in the technology industry. Jackson called Silicon Valley racist because only about seven percent of the tech workers in the region as well as the nation are Hispanic or black, according to Al Jazeera America. “Technology is supposed to be about inclusion, but sadly, patterns of exclusion remains the order of the day,” Jackson wrote in a missive to Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Facebook and other tech giants.
In January 2014, officials at the University of Minnesota announced that they were negotiating with a group of black student organizations after the organizations sent a letter to the flagship state university’s president complaining that crime alerts should not provide the color of the alleged perpetrator’s skin. The letter explained that stating a crime suspect’s skin color is racist, according to CBS Minnesota, because “in addition to causing Black men to feel unsafe and distrusted, racial profiling is proven to inflict negative psychological effects on its victims.” “The repeated black, black, black suspect,” said Ian Taylor Jr., president of the Black Men’s Forum, during a public discussion about the issue. “And what that does, it really discomforts the mental and physical comfort for students on campus because they feel like suspicions begin to increase.” (RELATED: Minnesota Radicals Demand Mandatory Transgender Classes Because Of Colonialism OR ELSE)
In 2006, some random blog called Truth First (“Support the TRUTH FIRST by supporting President Barack Obama”) proclaimed that the original Star Trek series is racist because its creator was a white person and the only black person in the completely fictional television show that takes place on a big space ship and on faraway planets features “one African character, Uhura” who “sits at the BACK of the bridge.” The show portrays Uhura “as an object of lust” to boot. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” is racist because Geordi La Forge is blind and Lieutenant Worf has a temper. “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” is racist because the chief villain puts an alien worm in a black guy’s ear and later the black guy commits suicide. The impressive list of racism includes six other instances in the science fiction franchise.
Salon, the cockroach of the Internet, branded superhero movies racist in February because superhero moviemakers tend to cast white actors in the lead roles and because a small contingent of fans of superhero books and comic books has complained on Twitter when black actors are cast in superhero roles. “[F]ans who have pictured the plot of a novel in their minds, or who have looked at the all-white Fantastic Four on the page, are entitled to be mildly surprised at a casting decision, but self-righteous anger is a bit excessive,” Salon instructs. However, “arguing that a movie like ‘The Avengers’ or ‘Fantastic Four’ ought to be cast on the basis of how the characters look in the comics is not really an argument.” So there.
In October 2013, home furnishing retailer Pottery Barn pulled sushi chef costumes for Halloween from stores across America after an Asian-American civil-rights group howled that the trick-or-treat garb was offensive to their cultural heritage. Pottery Barn also pulled a kimono outfit. Asian Americans Advancing Justice called for the “immediate removal” of the offensive get-ups because “Pottery Barn is marketing these outfits as costumes” and “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are real people who cannot and should not be commodified as Halloween costumes,” according to The Seattle Times. A spokeswoman for the aggrieved Asian group was dissatisfied with Pottery Barn’s response, saying, “It would help to show they have learned a lesson.”
Swans are racist, according to The Telegraph, because some swans seemed to exhibit a penchant for attacking foreign students on the campus of Warwick University in April. “I’m from India, and they attack me especially; they focus straight on me,” one student told the London broadsheet. “My friend was on the bridge and he was eating and the swan just randomly started biting off his jeans,” claimed another student, Palkein Ratra. School officials responded by putting in a fence around the lake where the birds were nesting.
Stand your ground laws are racist, according to the NAACP. The august civil rights organization made the proclamation in a March 2014 tweet, according to the website Weasel Zippers. “Stand Your Ground laws are symptomatic of institutional racism in the criminal justice system, the full tweet read, before citing an MSNBC article.
Get up to speed on the rest of the alphabet:
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