REALLY? REALLY? OKAY, REALLY?

My roommate/BFF Nikki and I have been talking a lot recently about how nice it'd be to exile people. "Fuck you, bye..FOREVER." (It's a really intense idea, sending people away forever and all, but that just makes it funny and fun to think about!)Usually this is just in reference to stupid dudes and disorganized professors etc but I'm starting to keep a list of politicians and other assorted publics figures that are up for possible BANISHMENT. Like this guy, Dean Grose who is the mayor of Los Alamitos, CA. Motherfucker sent a mass e-mail depicting the White House lawn covered in watermelons with a caption saying, "No Easter egg hunt this year." Yes, a publically elected mayor, sent this as a mass e-mail to other public officials including a Los Alamitos city volunteer, Keyanus Price, who is black. Price, who spoke to the Associate Press said, "I honestly don't even understand where he was coming from, sending this to me. As a black person receiving something like this from the city-freakin'-mayor - come on."

Grose in turn disagreed that the joke was racist and said, "Bottom line is, we laugh at things and I didn't see this in the same light that she did...I'm sorry. It wasn't sent to offend her personally - or anyone - from the standpoint of the African-American race."

So, uh, what exactly is the joke then? I don't get it. Obama just likes watermelons and wanted to grow some everywhere and that's the joke because it's like "whoa, dude really likes watermelons?" No. That is not the intended joke and the excuse of, "that's not what I meant by that" is UNACCEPTABLE. Like the New York Post cartoon last week, that's no fucking excuse. There is no excuse for that. Considering the history of racism and it's offshoots in art/entertainment/etc in this country, it is inexcuseable to play dumb. (You are a political cartoonist! You haven't seen the countless drawings of black people with super-exaggerated features and their bodies as monkeys and gorillas in the not so distant past? Yay freedom of expression and shit but would it be crazy to say no black people should be alluded to being monkeys or gorillas? Is that too much?) Even if Grose isn't lying about not intending the joke to play on stereotypical, narrow-minded representations on black people, ignorance is a cop-out.

This makes me so mad and it scares the shit out of me that this is the second of very public racist incidents to happen in the past two weeks. You can find the article here.