Uncommon IgnoranceThe controversy over Common's invitation to the White House won't go away.
Ta-Nahesi Coates is dismayed:
But Common is the dude in the Gap ad. His mother is a teacher. Shirley Sherrod is a victim of white supremacist terrorism, who lectures black people on seeing their own prejudice. Eric Holder went to Stuyvesant. Michelle Obama's mother was a homemaker. Her parents forfeited a full athletic scholarship to send Michelle Obama's brother to Princeton. They used to watch the Brady Bunch together.
If Common is disturbing, Shirley Sherrod wants to discriminate against white people, MIchelle Obama is obsessed with Whitey, and Barack Obama has a hatred of white people, then the rest of us are in real trouble. When you talk about "nonthreatening" this really is the best we've got.
Well, then we might as well accept that there is no such thing as nonthreatening blacks, then. As a reminder, Common wrote a sympathetic song about a woman who murdered a cop in cold blood.
