The Daily Show's Jon Stewart is fed up with conservatives' attempts to excuse and mask racism in the US.
Stewart highlighted coverage of a recently uncovered video that shows Oklahoma fraternity members singing a racist chant. Instead of focusing on the video's clear display of lingering racism in the US, a panel on MSNBC's Morning Joe came to the conclusion that hip-hop was somehow at the root of the problem.
"Popular culture becomes a cesspool," Bill Kristol, who's conservative, said on Morning Joe. "A lot of corporations profit over it, off it, and then people are surprised that some drunk 19-year-old kids repeat what they've been hearing."
Stewart fired back:
First of all, the kids on that bus weren't repeating a rap song that they had heard. They were gleefully performing one of their fraternity's old, let's call them, anti-negro spirituals, featuring a word that predates rap and probably folk and thought. Black rappers did not introduce that word into the vernacular.
And, second of all, how come when conservatives talk about African Americans, they say, "These people need to take responsibility for themselves, pull up those pants, get a job," but when white people do something racist, they're all, "Well, you can't blame them. How could those poor children know wrong from right, after being driven to madness by the irresistible power of the hippity hoppity"?
Stewart pointed out that this happens over and over in conservative media, from Fox News' coverage of Donald Sterling's racist comments last year to their coverage of the Justice Department report that found a pattern of racial bias in Ferguson, Missouri.
"Each time one of these come to light, certain people in the media present it not as being indicative of a deep problematic racial divide in our nation that exists till today," Stewart said, "but as an unending series of isolated events."
He added, "Rather than face the lingering reality of prejudice in this country, each incident, even the Department of Justice's Ferguson report, as comprehensive a catalog of race-based predation as anyone's going to find, it's an invitation to bend over backward to negate the role of race."
Further reading: Reaction to the Oklahoma frat scandal shows just how poorly Americans understand racism.
