But as people outside of Hollywood know, being talented doesn’t make a celebrity any more enlightened or insightful than anyone else. Witness the self-righteous, wrongheaded politics of progressive flagbearers like Howard Zinn devotée Matt Damon or Hugo Chavez BFF Sean Penn or Occupy cheerleader Mark Ruffalo. Americans vote solely on the basis of their skin color? Policies don’t matter? Jackson’s comments are stunningly thoughtless even for that Hollywood crowd. At least he was honest.
He then went on in the interview to spew the N-word more times than a Klansman and to express his hope that Obama would live up to the Angry Black Man racial stereotype that Jackson himself plays so convincingly:
When it comes down to it, they wouldn’t have elected a [N-word]. Because, what’s a [N-word]? A [N-word] is scary. Obama ain’t scary at all. [N-word] don’t have beers at the White House. [N-word] don’t let some white dude, while you in the middle of a speech, call [him] a liar. A [N-word] would have stopped the meeting right there and said, ‘Who the [expletive] said that?’ I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years, ‘cuz he ain’t gotta worry about getting re-elected.”
Obama’s policies did eventually concern Jackson. The actor has joined Castro-supporter Sidney Poitier in expressing frustration, for example, that the President hasn’t done more for the poor (apart from increasing their numbers). But other big names in black entertainment – like Will Smith and wife Jada Pinkett, Kerry Washington, Tracy Morgan, and rapper Jay-Z – have no complaints and plan to continue actively throwing their support behind the President. Choreographer Debbie Allen said,
I will be there again just like I was in 2008. Are things exactly the way I’d like them to be or need them to be? No, but he can get us there if he’s given the time he needs to do it.
Sorry Ms. Allen, but America doesn’t have that much time left – unless by “get us there” she means knock the already teetering pedestal out from under America’s superpower status and leave us a floundering, impotent, racially divided, Euro-socialist has-been. A post-American era has always been Obama’s goal anyway, and at the pace he’s managed thus far, another four years might be all that he needs to bring that about.
Of course, there are plenty of white Hollywood stars caught up in a history-making election who also voted for Obama because he’s black, which doesn’t exactly make them post-racialist either, as Shelby Steele points out:
When whites – especially today’s younger generation – proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially.
It’s impossible to know how many in Hollywood or elsewhere in America voted for the same reason as Samuel L. Jackson. The majority of Obama’s supporters no doubt got behind him because he’s black and because of his progressive message. At least those people recognized that his policies, however misguided and/or subversive, mattered. But Jackson only bothered to consider the color of Obama’s skin and not the content of his character – and that is the very definition of racism.
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