Friday, September 4, 2015

What we talk about when we talk about Yo White Daddy...

Yo Daddy is so White, that all his slave ships were zero emission.

Okay, so in the past year or so, I've been tormented by a stream of White Daddy jokes. I'm not sure exactly where it came from, but I was always really fascinated and horrified by the specific genre of Mama joke that has to do with Blackness. You know: "Your mama so black she...followed by something hella racist about her blackness." If you need a reference, Google it.

Anyway, I started tweeting them to my friend Ross and we went back and forth with it. But then I couldn't stop because they kept coming to me. And I tried to tweet a few out, but it was around the time I was looking for a job and that didn't seem to be helping things, and plus it didn't seem like people really got them. Maybe they still won't; I don't know. In some ways I don't really get them.

But hopefully people get that a good Yo Daddy So White joke has nothing to do with actual skin color, but the color of a certain type of perception, a white supremacist perception. A perception that actual White people don't even have a monopoly on. A perception that dictates so much of our inner discourse, whatever your race.

The homie, Rion Amilcar Scott, published them on Queensmob, so check them out now before I have to issue my public apology and go into a racism treatment program.