I sometimes wonder if liberals are honestly confused about why conservatives don't take them seriously when they say something is racist or if they're just feigning confusion in order to further the gag.
On an entirely unrelated note, Salon wants you to know that a tweet by The Onion that mentioned Quvenzhané Wallis (the nine-year-old star of Beasts of the Southern Wild) is super duper racist.
Most likely — the Onion has not yet responded to Salon for comment — whoever tweeted that was trying to bring America’s fawning obsession with the child star down a notch with a dose of schadenfreude. But that’s not how most of the Internet interpreted it. At best, the tweet reads like a degrading attack on a child; at worst, it’s a racially tinged degrading attack on a child, by virtue of the fact it dredges up memories of those offensive tweets directed at Rue from "The Hunger Games," another young, black, female child actress in her breakout role. Also, it turns out that no one really thinks calling a child a c-word is funny.
Go read the offending tweet and see if you come away with anything other than, 'Um, what?' First off, the target isn't actually Wallis: It's a comment on the asinine commentary that surrounds Oscar season. It's a critique of all the people who think they can judge actresses based on what they see in the tabloids and on Gawker. If anything, it's actually a liberal critique of the way we objectify women.
I'm sorry, what's that Salon?
But ... it's not! Not at all! Quvenzhané Wallis is not the target of that joke. At all. It takes an almost willful misreading of the joke to make that case. And it takes an immensely—almost comically—blinkered view of the world to try and link that tweet to the actually racist and ignorant tweets about The Hunger Games' Rue. It's insane. The whole world is going insane. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.