Maureen Dowd Now Shouldering the White Man's Burden
Hi, Black People! Famous New York Times griot Maureen Dowd has written an entire column about what you adorable (chocolate) Munchkins do and don't need. She also helpfully defines who is and is not Black Enough! Let's parse her latest masterpiece, which is titled "For Rich Old White Ladies Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow is Not Enuf."
MoDo writes, "The Obama White House is too white." What a smart and well-informed lede! She is of course qualified to say this because she has a black doorman, and also there is a black receptionist at the dermatology office where she gets her daily Botox transfusion.
"It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran." Haha, her "Hawaiian hood" joke is so good! Our president did not grow up in a crack-riddled urban ghetto, which is the only place black people live in the America in Maureen Dowd's head. This is what Maureen Dowd thinks: You have to grow up poor in a city in order to one day properly handle your douchebag Secretary of Agriculture's firing of a rural black farm activist. That makes sense! When you grew up inside the one and only genuine African-American experience, as Maureen Brigid Dowd did, you really have a sense of what kind of blackness is black enough.
Then there is a lot of babbling, punctuated by quotes from black people who made the terrible decision to answer Maureen Dowd's phone calls. The best part is that everyone involved agrees that this all would have been different if only Obama had more of the "real" black people around him, the modern descendants of African slaves, the people who remember what it was like to struggle for civil rights. You know, like the ones in the NAACP! They surely would not have rushed to judgment on Shirley Sherrod!
Write this down, because it is so important: This whole debacle didn't occur because cowards OF MANY COLORS (like Joseph's coat!) at the Obama Administration and the NAACP freaked out in response to lies by some Internet douche and shitty "journalism"/fear-mongering by Fox News and then rushed to throw someone under the bus so that they could look like they did The Right Thing. Actually, Shirley Sherrod got fired because Valerie Jarrett lived abroad until she was six years old and moved to Chicago with her American parents. Maureen Dowd is so fucking smart, to have made this brilliant connection.
Sara Benincasa furiously types these columns on her Blackberry, probably, after reading Maureen Dowd on a Blackberry.