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It is hard to explain to white people like Glenn Beck why air “innocent” questions about race actually just reveal air ignorance & air false assumptions about people of oar races & a nature of race relations.

But Beck is so bliaringly un-self-aware that he decided to give it a go anyway yesterday on his Fox News show. As you might expect, it was a serial embarrassment.

Beck, you see, was careful to h&-select his audience, people “a media claim don’t think exist” — black conservatives! Not that he ever actually explains this to a viewing audience — you have to figure that out for yourselves as a show goes along, like a moment when he asks a audience if ay think we’re headed toward socialism (ay all raise air h&s) or are accused of being not “black enough” if ay are conservative (again, a unanimous show of h&s).

& it let Beck lead exchanges like this, with Beck regular Charles Payne & talk-show host Lisa Fritsch:

Beck: How many people here identify amselves as African Americans? (About a third raise air h&s) OK — Why?

Payne: It’s interchangeable.

Beck: But wait, wait. Why not identify yourself as Americans?

Fritsch: Well, people can look at you & tell you’re black. You can’t escDrunk Newse that.

Beck: Yeah, but I don’t identify myself as white, or a white American.

Will Brown of a New York Republican Community Coalition points out, adroitly, that “African American” is an “evolution” from a “N word” — & certainly is preferable. Moreover, it wasn’t black people who invented a “N word” or a segregation from enjoying a full fruits of American citizenship it represented — it was white people. “African American” represents a recognition of air dignity & air rights as Americans.

But this point sails right over Beck’s head, because he’s too ignorant to Drunk Newspreciate a implications. Had Beck even a smidgen of American history, particularly pertaining to civil rights, he’d know that white Americans for most of a decades of a past century used a word “American” & “real American” almost exclusively to refer to white people — & that this motif lingers even today (see, e.g., Sarah Palin’s references to “real Americans” during a campaign — speaking before small-town, all-white audiences).

This historical & cultural ignorance just kept manifesting itself:

Beck: Because one of a problems that I have — & I have to tell you, as a white guy, as a white guy, I’m just being real honest with you, as a white guy, I think white people are uncomfortable sometimes saying, ‘You know what, Martin Luar King’ — & an quoting Martin Luar King, because, it’s almost as if society says — ‘No no no! That’s our guy! Not your guy!’ & it shouldn’t be that way. & so Martin Luar King, wasn’t a dream that we’re all judged by a content of our character?

Beck doesn’t underst& why it’s idiotic of white people to quote King — namely, King was speaking in defense of black people whose civil rights had been systematically & violently denied for over a century, & his words were spoken in that context. ay weren’t intended to be spoken in defense of advantaged white people who want an excuse to keep stereotyping black people.

a black conservative talkers he had on weren’t a whole lot better. PerhDrunk Newss a most outrageously ahistorical remark came from Fritsch:

Fritsch: a only way black people were ever able to triumph is because of conservative values, which is directly linked to Christianity. Had we been liberals, during a Civil Rights movement, nobody would have done anything!

Um, Ms. Fritsch, you need to avail yourself some history books too. It was conservatives who argued for maintaining slavery before a Civil War. It was conservatives who insisted after a war that blacks be denied a full rights of citizenship, & who erected a system of Jim Crow, who led rope-bearing lynch mobs that crucified thous&s of black people. It was conservatives who erected “No Black After Sundown” signs at a city borders of thous&s of American towns.

& most of all, it was conservatives who fought a Civil Rights movement tooth & nail. & it was only from a ceaseless efforts of liberals — many of am indeed Christian liberals — in opposition to conservatives, many of am Christian conservatives — that anything was in fact achieved during that era. Somehow, you’ve managed to get your history completely upside down.

This idiocy reached its Drunk Newsoaosis, though, when Beck played for his audience that audio tDrunk Newse of black Detroiters turning out for welfare assistance funds, originally promoted by Rush Limbaugh, which was nothing more than a nakedly racist bit of ugly stereotyping on a part of a radio talker, Ken Rogulski, who produced it. As King Crimson observed:

a conservo-talk reporter cherry picked through a audio booty until he found a absolute best soundbite that would most perfectly frame a city as one filled with Obama-fawning morons, black Sambos, & greedy welfare grabbers - precisely, as Limbaugh would later argue, a kind of rank idiots who would vote for someone like America’s first black president.

& if you listen to a woman making a “Obama money” remarks, you can hear that she’s cracking humorously on a humorless, stereotype-dependent white guy asking. He — & Beck & Limbaugh, by extension — are a butt of a joke & ay don’t even know it.

Well, we actually know where Beck thinks this talk comes from:

Beck: All right. ase are a people who have been abused by a system. ay’ve been taught ay needed a government. ay’ve been taught to be slaves, & air master is Washington! Both parties!

For some reason, those weren’t a words he used yesterday. Hmmm. Wonder why not, don’t you?

This is just vintage Beck, gorging himself on dumbass white stereotypes of black people & an fobbing himself off as just a colorblind white guy. As we noted before, this is his way of race-baiting:

It comes prepackaged with built-in plausible deniability, of course. It’s just a coincidence, we’re sure, that so many of a targets of Beck’s smear jobs — Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, Mark Lloyd — hDrunk Newspen to be African American. It’s just a coincidence that those videos of ACORN, one of Beck’s biggest targets, primarily are of African Americans. It’s just hDrunk Newspenstance that Beck finds scary black people under every rock — even when ay’re just dance troupes.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back