“He’s a bro with no ho,” Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) joked Thursday about never-married bachelor Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to another member of the Senate Appropriations Committee — a joke that was caught on an open mike. But it is what he said next that compounded the offense. “That’s what we’d say on the South Side.”
“I want to make sure we have elected people constantly looking at helping the African-American community,” Kirk said. “With this state and all of its resources, we could sponsor a whole new class of potential innovators like George Washington Carver and eventually have a class of African-American billionaires. That would really adjust income differentials and make the diversity and outcome of the state much better so that the black community is not the one we drive faster through.“
YEAH. He’s a dumb old white shitbird from the ‘burbs and that’s how they all fucking roll. It’s an article of faith among them that so-called black slang is funny and “bad” neighborhoods are just waiting for a mini-van driven by a white person to roll through so they can turn into a horror flick. It’s not so much offensive as it is really, really lazy; they all have this mental shorthand they use for people who are Not Like Them, and this is how it sounds.
I’m not sure it does more or less damage than the outright racism and/or white supremacy, this casual misunderstanding, because I’m not the one hurt by it. I do know I cringe when I hear it, because this guy is not that much older than me, and way to sound like Grandpa Simpson.
A.
Eh, he is worse than suburban. Kirk is the very model of a downstate Illinois power broker, one of those places where they still speak fondly of the days the klan kept ‘those’ people in their place. The only non-whiter-than-white residents in his former district in Champaign-Urbana are students to the state university, who get the hell out the first second they can after graduation.