Apparently we aren’t quite a post-racist society yet. First, African Americans vote en masse for Obama – imagine the furor that would have resulted if only 10% of whites had voted for him? It would have been seen as positive proof of American perfidy, and we’d be hearing about it for generations, especially from societies that are far more racist than ours. Now poor little billionaire Tiger Woods, caught acting like every other poor little billionaire (ie, doing Whatever The Fuck He Wants, just like you and I would, dear reader, if we were billionaires), is being criticized for his personal tastes:
On the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner radio show, Woods was the butt of jokes all week.
“Thankfully, Tiger, you didn’t marry a black woman. Because if a sister caught you running around with a bunch of white hoochie-mamas,” one parody suggests in song, she would have castrated him.
“The Grinch’s Theme Song” didn’t stop there: “The question everyone in America wants to ask you is, how many white women does one brother waaant?”
As one blogger, Robert Paul Reyes, wrote: “If Tiger Woods had cheated on his gorgeous white wife with black women, the golfing great’s accident would have been barely a blip in the blogosphere.”
The darts reflect blacks’ resistance to interracial romance. They also are a reflection of discomfort with a man who has smashed barriers in one of America’s whitest sports and assumed the mantle of the world’s most famous athlete, once worn by Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.
Woods apparently refers to himself as a “Cablinasian”, a synthetic abbreviation designed to capture at least some of his Thai, Dutch, African American, Native American and Chinese ancestry. Am I the only one who thinks the notion that having less-than-100%-pure European blood makes one a “brother” is just as racist as the notion that having less-than-100%-pure European blood makes one a “mud person”?
Or am I missing some sort of nuance, here?
