I really think it must be a slow news week. The entire country, it seems, is all in a tizzy about John Mayer’s use of the word ‘nigger’ in a Playboy article. When I read fellow Nashvillian Molly Secours’s latest Huffington Post article in which she takes Mayer to task, I honestly thought it was satire. It had to be, right? How else can a writer launch into a diatribe in which she heaps coals on the heads of all white people for being racist?
In an attempt to be subtle, I suppose, she begins her piece with a rather superior rumination on young pretty women. It’s the first of many confidently declared prejudices in an article laced with gleeful snobbery.
Yesterday I was musing about the unconscious arrogance of pretty young women who believe they will enjoy the world of privilege and power afforded to them by beauty — forever. It seems all it takes is a 40th birthday to notice the expiration date on the ‘all access pass.’
Not unlike wealthy men who cannot conceive of operating in the world without the limitless advantages of the double platinum American Express — until it is revoked.
Wow. Bold, Molly. Bold. I wonder what has caused her to live with such a classist mentality? Let’s boil this one down: “Racism is awful, and also I group people into easy stereotypes and ridicule them for the thoughts I assume are running through their heads.” It staggers the imagination.
Suffice it to say Mayer’s words were symptomatic and indicative of white arrogance.
I suppose Secours feels she can be so bold in her declarations of white arrogance because she’s white. (Maybe she’s revealing her own racial proclivities? One has to wonder.) She apparently holds to the notion that one cannot be racist about their own race. Sane people argue, on the other hand, that making sweeping derogatory statements about a group of people because of their race is the very definition of racism. Being a member of the group in question provides no exemption. The baseless comment is ignorant regardless.
Perhaps she’s speaking specifically of one person and his tendency toward racial slurs? Not even close. Without wasting time, she ropes all whites in together as racists.
Mayer is exhibit ‘A’ when illustrating that racism resides within all white people. No exception. Sorry. Whether you are a hip, young liberal white guy who has played music with famous black musicians or a guy working at a factory in a rural Kentucky.
Mayer is just another white man of privilege who has not wrestled with the harsher realities still facing many black and brown folks or the arrogance depicted by his words. I doubt he has struggled with his identity as a white man of privilege and how his own behaviors have unconsciously contributed to reinforcing white supremacy.
So due to a major social faux pas in which John Mayer played a bit too familiar with a culturally charged word, this silly writer responds with a literary garbage heap that has become home to some of her most cherished prejudices. So forward thinking.
If we need further evidence that Ms. Secours does not live in reality, we need look only to her bio.
In 2000, she presented an intervention to the United Nations in Santiago, Chile, proposing that the U.S. “repudiate the official histories and language(s) that maintain the hegemonic and unearned privileges accorded to those who are identified as “white”.
