‘That’s Racist’

‘That’s racist.”

It’s a comedic catchphrase these days, popularized by an online clip from a 2005 TV show Wonder Showzen on MTV2. {snip}

Across the country, it’s a staple of schoolyards, Internet discussion groups, Twitter, and sitcoms.

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Perhaps the greatest sign that the punch line has gone mainstream came last week when NPR’s All Things Considered reported on “that’s racist.” Correspondent Neda Ulaby explored how a phrase once considered one of the most serious accusations possible has become a gag line. The only problem? It’s not clear she actually gets the joke.

Ulaby relied heavily on Regina Bradley, who teaches African-American literature at Florida State University. Bradley admits her students say “that’s racist” all the time: “They were simply using it to lump discussions of race and race discourse all together. Because they were just saying because we brought up issues of race that was considered to be racist.”

Okay, so apparently the reason these kids say “that’s racist” is that they’re not too bright. But, wait, there’s more. According to Ulaby, Bradley also believes that the students are using the joke to establish up front that they themselves aren’t racist. {snip}

Hold on, another explanation is that kids simply mimic the stuff they see on TV shows like 30 Rock and South Park.

I don’t want to overanalyze, but it seems as if everyone’s bending over backward to come up with the least obvious explanations for a pretty obvious joke.

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But what’s the joke? We don’t find out until a 14-year-old-boy says it plainly: “I think I or other people just sort of do it as a way of mocking people who are overly sensitive about race issues.”

Bingo!

NPR could have done the whole story in 30 seconds. But instead it spent more than five minutes trying to grapple with a wonderful yet utterly inconvenient truth for the ostentatiously liberal network: Young people just aren’t as uptight about race as their parents, never mind their grandparents, are. And, by the way, the days of segregated swimming pools and neighborhoods haven’t merely “yielded” to “more subtle forms of discrimination”; they’ve yielded to–wait for it–less discrimination.

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But the simple fact is “that’s racist” is the sort of thing those darn kids today say to make fun of their aging Gen X and baby-boomer parents.

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And that’s the joke. And the people who’ve spent the last few decades screaming “that’s racist,” not as a punch line but as a heinously unfair accusation or in an attempt to bully people, don’t seem to get that the joke is on them.