It Used to Matter When a Politician Yelled 'N-gger'
Sacha Baron Cohen is an entertainer, not an educator. His new Showtime series, Who is America?, doesn’t respond to the question that its title poses. Instead, Cohen invites us to laugh at the answer.
Still, the chameleonic Cohen finds truth in the course of his deception. In the two weeks since his show premiered, we have seen “Erran Morad,” his fake Israeli anti-terrorism expert, coach former Republican lawmakers and gun zealots to advocate for the arming of schoolchildren. This past Sunday, the “Morad” character got Georgia state representative Jason Spencer to drop both his pants and the word “nigger.” Spencer, who is white, screamed it repeatedly, with that hard “r” at the end. (Spencer’s segment also included a racist impersonation of a Chinese man.)
Spencer wasn’t tricked into showing his ass – he saw the cameras, and that is who he is. Last summer, Spencer told a black attorney that she “won’t be met with torches but something a lot more definitive” and that she and others opposed to Confederate statues “will go missing” in a local swamp. In an America concerned with doing more than paying lip service to racial justice, a man like Spencer would have been sent out on the same backside that he revealed on Cohen’s show. Alas.
One could argue that Cohen is doing a public service by outing folks like Spencer as prejudiced, stupid or both. Displays of overt racism, after all, make these people easier to spot. As many of us have been told, it is better to learn what people truly think about you. The president’s very name has been used as a slur to demean, belittle and intimidate. Even more telling is that a state lawmaker like Spencer feels no significant pressure to resign after, quite literally, exposing himself on national television and dropping that hard “r,” over and over.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/sacha-baron-cohen-racism-episode-703047/
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