It’s not difficult

A reminder from Amber Ruffin to stop giving a pass to so-called “casual” racism

This week on the Amber Ruffin Show, she did a segment calling out racist jackass Sonny David Purdue for his disgraceful mockery of Kamala Harris’s name at a campaign rally. And damn, was it satisfying to see.

There’s been so much inexcusably vile stuff being flung around, that this kind of thing can get lost in the noise. Is it really that harmful? Aren’t there bigger things to worry about? But one thing that people always say about any skill is that you’ve got to make sure you’ve mastered the fundamentals before you can move on to more advanced things. I’d say that the same thing applies to being a decent human.

PS: If you’ve ever made a lazy joke about M Night Shyamalan’s name, that’s almost the same thing.

Edited to add: There’s one thing that I just can’t get over: the guy who’s trying to mock and belittle someone for having a name that reflects her race and her heritage, is named Sonny Purdue. Talk about glass houses, but with a rusted old pickup truck on concrete blocks out front.

Edited to add, later: Apparently I’ve completely mixed up my good ol boys. The racist jackass in the above video is US Senator David Purdue, who is cousins with the racist jackass ex-Georgia governor Sonny Purdue. On the one hand, I’m embarrassed for making such a lazy mistake. On the other, I can’t say I care all that much. At least I didn’t call him Davidalocawhatever to the giggles and cheers of my all-white crowd.

2 thoughts on “It’s not difficult”

    1. I can’t even imagine. I did get a few racist name pronunciations coming from the other direction, though. A few times in the 70s and early 80s, I had people ask if my name was pronounced like “Jerrdan.” It didn’t make any sense, but I later found out that a lot of former slaves adopted the name “Jordan,” so it became a fairly common name among black families. White families in the south wanted to emphasize their German whiteness, so they started pronouncing it “Jerrdan.”

Comments are closed.