Commentary: Don Lemon and Joy Reid Are White Liberals in Blackface

By Torrance Stephens, Ph.D.

It seems as if the people who are doing the most productive work in black communities across this great nation are never the ones we see on TV complaining about how systemically racist the United States of America is. Instead, they are the people of all races who see a problem and are willing to roll up their sleeves and put that work in to show the opportunities offered by this country.

These are people like Scott Presler and the hundreds of volunteers he amassed to assist in cleaning up the streets of Baltimore—it wasn’t Kweisi Mfume, Elijah Cummings, or Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake. Then there is Pete Keller of ULON (United Legion, One Nation) in Chicago, who is striving to offer help and change the lives of ex-offenders and prevent youth from becoming involved with gangs—not Lori Lightfoot or Kim Foxx. Not to be forgotten is Jason Mercado, who, through his baking business, Sweet Mission, trains and employs homeless people who need a new start in life in California. This is work not done by Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Watters, George Gascón, or London Breed.

The loudest complainers typically are well-to-do black talking heads that have less experience and knowledge of the real issues they constantly yelp are hurting poor and minority communities. Truthfully, they are not to be found in these places and have more in common with wealthy, elite white progressives. They represent a new-age type of blackface.

After the Civil War, it became popular in the United States for white performers to play characters that demeaned newly freed slaves. This practice became known as blackface, and it was entertainment designed to reinforce the presupposed stupidity of former slaves.

In his North Star newspaper, Fredrick Douglass called such entertainers “the filthy scum of white society.” A similar practice has become standard activity for media personalities convinced that racism is the top issue confronting American blacks in 2021. It is as if all they can do is talk about race and racism. They are more closely connected with the elite activist class than with 90 percent of blacks across the country. There are many of these people who happen to be black but are more accurately described as liberal whites in blackface.

These modern minstrels are all over the place, too numerous to name, including but not limited to the likes of Lester Holt, Oprah Winfrey, Jemele Hill, Eugene Robinson, Yamiche Alcindor, Dean Baquet, and April Ryan. They claim to be journalists purveying the interests of black people (with whom they do not interact), when in reality they are political activists for a wealthy white progressive American agenda.

Two that stick out are Don Lemon and Joy Reid. A commonality between them all, however, is that they are totally disconnected from reality and practice a form of journalism that has replaced principles of objectivity and purpose with narratives, the most common being the philosophy of race-obssessed wokism.

They preach for black folk to be more concerned with hating white people that had nothing to do with slavery, more than how crime is disabling our neighborhoods. They advocate on behalf of failing government public schools and teachers unions, over and against parents and their children that desire school choice.

Nearly 90 percent of blacks support school choice, but these media personalities villify their view and ignore them. Do these social justice warriors have shows or hard-hitting interviews or positive discussions of school choice? Do they have shows or hard-hitting interviews or discussions of why more than 80 percent of black public school students are not proficient in math and reading? The answer to both is no. Instead, theirs is a singular vocabulary of racism.

It is as if these people just want to flame division and make the condition of blacks worse rather than address problems that could be solved via a collective effort.

Teaching and reporting systemic racism as being more important than teaching math, English, science, and other classes like auto mechanics or welding will put us in a deeper hole. History should be taught, and it angers me when the Reids and Lemons of this country regularly tell people they are victims rather than that they can accomplish anything.  All this does is perpetrate more hate that leads back to increased and unnecessary racial animosity.

They represent an untruthful media: a media of projection that rejects treating individuals as individuals and falsely claims that people can’t relate to others simply because of their skin color.

These cats do not practice journalism and are so far removed from reality, it’s impossible to believe their claim to have our best interests in mind, in particular when addressing the major problems for poor Americans, especially in black communities. That is how removed these people are from our lives, that they think what happened on January 6 is more important than rising gas prices, crime, and the loss of jobs to illegal immigration.

How about some congressional hearings on failing schools, stopping gang violence, or cyberattacks on our infrastructure? Why not interview the Jews or Asian victims of hate crimes, or mothers whose kids have died because of gang violence, or parents who have kids that graduate through social promotion and cannot read. These are the main issues people care about.

I wouldn’t wait on it. The talking head leftists in blackface would rather focus on biological, hereditary differences between people and downplay the value of individual merit, ignoring fact such as that America is so racist that illegal immigrants from Africa cross the southern border to get here and it was mostly whites that put Barack Obama in the White House.

The disinformation and lies and race-bating they promote has to stop if the goal is to seek solutions. If not, they are the problem, and they serve only to continue the tradition of blackface and represent “the filthy scum of white society.”

Originally posted at Thought Crime-Permanently Banned from Twitter & YouTube. Reprinted with permission.