Chris Rock’s July 4th Tweet Not Racist; History is Racist

COMMENTARY | So now it’s racist to point out racism. Even if we’re talking about hardcore, hundreds-of-years-ago, institutionalized ironic racism. Comedian Chris Rock tweeted on July 4: “Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks.”

According to Entertainment on Today, this statement made a bunch of people angry, and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why. The first part is factually correct. Slavery was in full force and effect on July 4, 1776, the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Slavery was mentioned in the subsequent Constitution, where slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the people who “owned” them.

The second part is a joke. I’m thinking they probably didn’t have fireworks celebrations then, which is what makes it funny. My apologies to Chris Rock for the crime against humor I just committed.

So what, then, is the issue, exactly? I am white, and no matter how I try to take apart that sentence, no matter how I parse it, divide it into little bits, I cannot find anything that would cause offense.

There is an inherent contradiction in calling something “Independence Day” when a large segment of the population was anything but independent. All Rock’s comment does is force people to stop, to think, and to look at something they’ve always seen one way and make them see it another.

People hate it when you do that.

Reactions included calling it a “sneer.” There was a tweet that sounds remarkably defensive considering the time frame cited: “Slavery existed for 2000yrs before America. We eradicated it in 100yrs. We now have a black POTUS,” followed by an unrepeatable hashtag.

What’s a hundred years, give or take? Not bad, as long as you’re not the slave, I guess.

A right-wing blog deemed Rock a “far-left comedian.” Over what, exactly? Pointing out that not everyone was free on that first Independence Day, or the 88 that followed until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December of 1865?

We are living in an age where people’s feelings about race make them extremely uncomfortable, sometimes because they realize that there is a gap between what they feel society wants them to believe and what they really believe.

And sometimes people don’t actually want to believe what they really believe, but there they sit, these ideas that the amount of melanin in someone’s skin somehow controls a myriad of other characteristics. There’s a way to soothe that feeling, though, it seems: Believe the other guy is thinking the same thing, because then you’re justified.

That’s what’s behind this illogical outrage, not at history itself, but at someone pointing out the irony of history. That’s what’s behind the suspension and subsequent “parting of ways” of former Politico journalist Joe Williams when, in response to a direct question about Mitt Romney’s unpopularity with minority voters, he observed that Romney seemed more comfortable around people who were like him.

There is no racism in saying that people of color may get the idea that Romney is not comfortable around people of color. There is no racism in pointing out our nation’s contradictory history of freedom.

These claims are a way to create victimhood from nothing, to form persecution from air and defensive listening. What they do is muddle any real discussion of race and actual racism, and no doubt, that’s the calculated point.