The Daily Banter‘s White House correspondent Tommy Christopher is a white dude who somehow gets past the White House Secret Service using a name that isn’t his. He also claims to know a thing or two about racism.
“Christopher,” as he calls himself, fancies himself something of a race expert, and calls people out for being “racist” any chance he gets. In fact, he pissed off his former editors at Mediaite so much during the hearings involving Trayvon Martin and his murderer, George Zimmerman, that they had to tell him to tone it down. He claims that isn’t true, but Mirror sources have been informed otherwise.
Anyone wonder how Christopher became such a race expert?
His sensitivities to race and what appears to be his inherent racism began in the third grade, when the journalist used the unfortunately all too common slur for a black person: “nigger.” (Full disclosure: When I recently quoted Breitbart‘s John Nolte as calling WaPo‘s Wesley Lowery a “snowflake” and remarked that the description was closer to the truth since half of Lowery’s gene pool is white, Christopher lashed out and insisted it was a racial slur. Snowflake is not a racial slur, nor was it intended as such. “Nigger,” however, is an actual racial slur.)
Apart from Christopher’s obviously laser eye for racial slurs, he also thinks he’s got great gaydar.
In a recent story , Christopher went off on Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler, a white guy who jokingly told a story involving a black female friend and a watermelon anecdote at a book awards ceremony. The woman was Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming, which earned her the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Christopher somehow figured out that Handler is gay (don’t worry about facts here, Christopher admits his stupidity soon enough). After watching Handler’s speech, Christopher had reactions about Handler’s sexuality.
He wrote, “Handler, as a gay man, may have felt enough of a kinship with Woodson’s struggles as a minority to make a joke that overstepped. Problem is, the dude’s not gay, so I guess I’m the asshole. Fascinating.”
You know what’s more fascinating? Christopher doesn’t say why he perceived Handler as gay. But lord knows it couldn’t possibly involve any stereotypes he’d admit to, dare he be perceived as anti-gay.
Still, it’s the watermelon stereotype that really gets Christopher’s goat. After all, he once sat at Woolworth lunch counters in the South to stand up to racist practices (no, no not really). “Racism has always pissed me off…but there’s something special about the watermelon stereotype,” he wrote.
Special how?
This is when Christopher points to a brilliant panel of guests on a recent Melissa Harris Perry show on MSNBC who discussed how delicious both watermelon and fried chicken are. But Christopher, being a race expert and white activist for black people, says he has unconsciously banned watermelon from his diet. You read that right: Watermelon is dead to him because of his solidarity with black people.
And then the strangest of confessionals.
“I realized that even though watermelon is the only kind of melon I can stand, I haven’t eaten it in decades,” he wrote. “I think the dumbass racist stereotype is why.”
In true Christopher fashion, he over-explained himself, adding that even seeing a watermelon makes him feel funny. “Eventually, just looking at one gave me that Clockwork Orange sick feeling, so I guess I just avoided it without even realizing it,” he wrote, referencing the 1971 film whose main character is a sociopath who’s into rape, beating the elderly and murder. The main character receives aversion therapy — in his disturbing case, he’s trained to feel sick whenever he sees a sexual image or hears Beethoven, his favorite composer.
Christopher says he met his first “racist” when he was 10 and never heard the n-word until he watched Roots.
He even used it himself, much to the horror of Ms. Ross, his third grade teacher.
“The first white person I ever heard say it, I must confess, was me when, in third grade, while inspecting what I thought must be a defective globe, I loudly exclaimed ‘There’s a country called Nigger!'” the journalist wrote in his recent story. “My mortified teacher, Ms. Ross, explained that it was pronounced ‘NYE-jur,’ which I skeptically regarded as a thin pretext for obviously racist globe-makers.”
Asked if he has also unconsciously avoided fried chicken over the years, he said he already addressed it in his piece. “At least in my experience, you could eat fried chicken around other white people without incident, but watermelon always drew a comment out of some asshole,” he wrote.
In Christopher’s world, you’re presumed racist until proven otherwise.
Unless, of course, you give up watermelon.