1st Lady Got Back.
Thanksgiving in my family is a little different from that of the typical American family. I have twelve siblings all with children and grandchildren and, with one exception, we’re all South-siders. So when one of my sisters came to the party and began passing out copies of a commentary she down-loaded from the Chicago Sun-Times/AP (11/22/08) it stimulated a bit of conversation foreign to the ears of some our progeny. The author of the piece is a black woman named Erin Kaplan and the subject of the article is the magnificence of the First Lady elects’ prominent ass.

In the article of some 500 words Kaplan rhapsodized on the perfection of Michelle’s fine boo-tay and the important role this will play in black women’s self-esteem for the next 4 to 8 years. Honestly I had not considered that part of the human anatomy in my voting decision but it all makes sense now that B. O. has won. I may be mistaken because I don’t listen to a whole lot of Rapp music but I do believe that Bertha Big Butt has been positively the central focus of black culture for a good many decades. It does not seem to me that black women need any further encouragement to admire their own keesters more than they already do. Nor do I believe that anyone’s hinnie, no matter its hue or mass, should be a matter of national pride. Naturally my siblings all agreed and looked upon the base imbecility of the column as further evidence of America’s social devolution.

In the course of our conversation it seemed only natural that someone would mention that at the root of this black perspective lay the old argument of “whose ass is blackest”. That someone, I’m afraid, was me. And at this point our lone north-sider lost her cool.

“What, exactly, does that even mean!?”

Now my daughter is one of the brightest, most charming and under-control women you could ever hope to meet. But she has lived in the heady air of an extremely liberal environment all of her 30-something years. She has her masters’ degree, of course, and though she is brilliant some things are simply missing from her life experience. I knew she was not going to understand the context of my statement but I did not think she had never heard the phrase “whose ass is blackest” before. I knew that I was only going to get in one or two sentences of explanation before the conversation moved on so in answer to her question I quickly threw in “it’s an adage similar to ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ that originated among blacks themselves”.

Too little. Too late. Anyone bred north of 55th street would tell you that in that instant I had made an unforgivable racist remark. It could not be taken back. It could not be explained away. Maybe it can’t be explained away but that’s not going to stop me from trying.

The phrase, “Arguing over whose ass is blackest” goes back to before the end of the 19th century. In those days racism was all-pervasive. It was so common that few people ever even suspected that they were being racist. It was simply the common perception that blacks were inferior to whites. They were” known” to be inherently lazy and so stupid that leading progressives of the day argued that they might actually be a subspecies of human that ought to be bred out of existence, i.e. neutered at birth. It was this assumption about blacks; their laziness and stupidity, that was a large part of the reason for the failure of blacks to gain good employment and rise in the social ranks.

In that atmosphere it was only natural that blacks themselves would be contaminated with an impression of their own inferiority. A sense of hopelessness and despair was impossible to avoid. There was a craving in the soul of the individual black person to find something redemptive in his being. And it should be no surprise for any white person to learn that blacks have, within their own social network, developed a form of anti-black racism amongst themselves. It stood to reason that if white skin is superior to black skin then the lighter a black man’s skin the better he is than the dark skinned black man.

Some white people may also not be aware that a black person’s skin will darken by degrees if exposed to enough sun just like the skin of a white person. So when it came to blacks arguing with one another over which of them was “blackest” there would sometimes be a showdown. Each would lower his drawers to compare the least sun exposed portion of his body to settle any doubts about whose ass was blackest.

It is forbidden in America to speak of things racial except in the tone of contempt for “white history”. But white history is an invention of bigotry itself. Aside from ultra-right extremists the most adamant promoters of the concept of “white history” are your average Leftists; the same people who insist on a separate “black history”. This reflects that most bizarre of Leftist thought trains that concludes that the cure for bigotry is to insist on focusing on our differences.

The good news is that the euphemism we’ve been discussing has gone virtually extinct in white culture. I can’t say the same for certain about the black community but I think its dead there too. Apparently it’s been replaced by the new black euphemism; “whose ass is finest”. I guess that’s progress in the Progressive scheme of things.