Column: Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy.

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D o a search for “Larry Elder” and gorilla on the CNN website and nothing comes up. Washington Post? Zilch. Nothing comes up on the New York Times site either, although if you make it to the 15th paragraph of a story entitled “The Vice President pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area,” you will find a bland passing reference to Wednesday’s disgusting incident. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of California, by hurling an egg that touched his head.

If Elder were a Democrat, the attack would have been instantly and with good reason dubbed racist. It would not only be front-page news, it would be just about the only news you were hearing about today on CNN and MSNBC. Charles Blow, Perry Bacon, and Jamelle Bouie would each be writing the first in a series of angry columns about it. So would Gail Collins, Jonathan Capehart, Jennifer Rubin, Michelle Goldberg, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Dana Milbank, and Ezra Klein. We would be treated to multiple news analyses about the history of the usage of gorilla tropes against blacks. Joy-Ann Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Don Lemon would be doing hour-long broadcasts on the attack, convening panels discussing just how the attack pulls the scab off racism in America, and proves we have so much work left to do in dealing with the problem. Vox would commission a series about California’s grim history of racism dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Asian-American and Latino writers would hasten to explain that California’s historic hostility to all sorts of persons of color is as traditional as its Tournament of Roses parade. Three-thousand-word essays about the brutal, unknown history of lynchings in the Golden State would be published in The Atlantic and/or The New Yorker. Al Sharpton, exhibiting a combination of exhaustion and despondency, would be a guest on half a dozen cable TV shows.

The woman who threw the egg at Elder would find her picture, her name, and everything she’d ever said on social media scrutinized at great length and on the home pages of the leading news sites. Her appearance would be mocked by late-night comedians. Dozens of reporters would be sent out to learn this woman’s story, to check out where she lived, where she worked, and where she went to school.

Remember what happened when a white woman in Central Park told a black man she would mention his race in the course of reporting his threat to her dog on a 911 call? That was a huge nationwide news story, despite having happened the same day as the murder of George Floyd, and even though the people involved were just ordinary New Yorkers — neither of them an important candidate a step away from one of the highest offices in the country. If Elder were a Democrat we’d be told there is a vast and wide-ranging racist plot to stop California from electing its first black governor. The stakes are a bit higher than “white dog lady calls cops on black bird-watcher.” Isn’t our democracy itself imperiled when a white person in a gorilla mask tries to leverage racism against a popular black candidate?

Nicklaus Sandman?

Nicklaus Sandman?

I think you mean Nicholas Sandmann. That little twit deserves whatever he gets. If I were headmaster of any school at which he was a pupil, I would have expelled him immediately for besmirching the school's good name. Unfortunately, the school he attends has far lower standards and no sense of shame.

Oddly, I don't recall a lot of monkey stuff aimed at Obama,

Uncle Tom
/ˌəNGkəl ˈtäm/
noun - OFFENSIVE•NORTH AMERICAN
Definition: a black man considered to be excessively obedient or servile to white people; a person regarded as betraying their cultural or social allegiance. E.G., "he called moderates Uncle Toms."

by the above definition, HOW is that Elder piece of work NOT an "uncle tom"? HOW is he NOT selling his POC brethren down the river 18 ways past sunday? i gots to know.

The problem is that it's a racial insult, that you're insulting a black man for having politics that are completely unremarkable, and would not be remarked upon if held by a white man. Calling educated black people Oreos, or assimilated Asians bananas or coconuts is similar, it's best not to try to police people's beliefs based on their race. As far as being "accurate", a generally agreed to be beyond the pale slur for black people literally means "ignorant" in it's original definition, but I wouldn't try to argue that the term is okay to use if the person you're using it on actually is ignorant, it's best to simply avoid racial slurs, including Uncle Tom.