As we come off the heels of Don Imus’ infamous public plunge, Rush Limbaugh served up a similarly distasteful nugget on his syndicated radio show yesterday exposing a side he seemed all too eager to share with his audience. Limbaugh “played a song parody in which an Al Sharpton impersonator (played with stereotypical gusto) sings a song filled with idiotic assumptions about black people called Barack the Magic Negro,” (view the video and read about the routine). Like Imus’ show, Rush’s performance are reliant on sometimes latent and sometimes unconcealed racism that masquerades as cultural or social critique, typically centered on the criminality or simian comparisons of minorities and African-Americans in particular.
But Rush’s ‘critiques’ have never been critiques, rather venomous attacks based on race that seek to undermine and delegitimize the abilities of African-Americans. This latest attack is the exemplification of the angry white male mystique that Rush exploits: Barack Obama is not a successful, articulate politician in his own right, but a successful, articulate black politician — another black male who enjoys a position of prestige and power simply by being black. He satisfies his audience by railing against a society perceived to prop up blacks of lesser merit at the expense of the anonymous white male through the welfare system, affirmative action, and all things politically correct.
