Wigger Lover

He knows black people!

From the alternative paper in Richmond, VA. This is a profile of the white dude that wrote for Chappelle and the Chris Rock Show. He's now a writer for SNL, but you can see him on the "I Know Black People" game show by clicking below and going to Spike TV's website.

Live from New York

Behind the scenes of “Saturday Night Live” with Richmond-raised comedy writer Bryan Tucker.
by Brent Baldwin

Submerged in a festive swarm of “Saturday Night Live” writers — a mix of balding 40-somethings and fresh-faced young hipsters with toothpick-thin girlfriends — Bryan Tucker bounds down the stairwell from the writers’ room on the ninth floor of NBC Studios at Rockefeller Center to the eighth floor of studio 8H. Strangely enough, the person leading the charge is Jonah Hill, chunky young star of “Superbad,” just one of many celebrities hanging out backstage tonight.

...

The unseen workings of “SNL” are controlled chaos, the result of painstaking detail and hours of writing and rewriting. For Tucker, the funny white kid from the suburbs of Brandermill with a knack for riffing on hip-hop culture, it’s the pinnacle. Since moving to New York in 1997, Tucker, 36, has gone from unknown stand-up comic to a hardworking comedy writer. He’s worked for such shows as “Late Show With David Letterman,” “The Chris Rock Show,” “Mad TV” and “Chappelle’s Show,” where he solidified his reputation as the white chocolate of comedy.

...

Tucker was able to sell enough jokes to quit temping and focus on his comedy, including his stand-up routine. He learned how to apply for more television writing jobs from other stand-ups. He got an even bigger break in 1999 when he was offered a job on HBO’s “The Chris Rock Show.”

It was the perfect environment for a young comedic writer. Rock — at the height of his fame — treated his writers well, taking them to baseball games and movie premieres; they’d even occasionally hang out with Bill Cosby. Even more important, he let the writers produce their sketches and control every aspect: casting, design, production, even sitting in the editing room.

“You took all the credit or all the blame, which was empowering and good,” Tucker says, who also learned to shoot and edit material during his two seasons there. “I had no idea how great I had it on that show because it was my first job.”

Tucker got a jolt of encouragement when his first big sketch aired. It was called “Daddy Still Has a Flattop,” a parody of the old ABC After School Specials.

“Chris [Rock] wanted to hire black writers on the show, and the head writer was black. But what he cared about the most was making it funny. He loved Woody Allen, surreal humor, and he wanted to bring that to a black audience,” Tucker says. “Mostly he said, ‘Don’t try to write black, just write it funny and it will be black because I’m doing it.’ That was a good lesson for me early on.”

Little did Tucker know that this job was the first step in his becoming known as a white guy who could write for black comedians. The irony isn’t lost on him.

“I came from Brandermill, suburban Richmond, so it wasn’t like I had a lot of black culture around me,” he says. “It was just watching it from the periphery and I was a fan [of hip-hop culture]. It was more about making things funny and not being scared of black culture than it was being a part of it.”

...

Tucker quickly struck comedy gold again when he began writing for the out-of-left-field Comedy Central smash hit “Chappelle’s Show.” Dave Chappelle and his former writing partner, Neal Brennan, wrote 80 percent of the material. Tucker knew Brennan from doing stand-up around New York City and began to send in jokes to the show on a freelance basis. He was hired midway through the second season, one of only two full-time writers the show ever hired. He also began appearing in sketches.

The industry took notice after the astronomical DVD sales of “Chappelle’s Show” — it eventually became one of the biggest-selling television DVDs of all time, moving more than 3 million units. “I didn’t have any producer credit or anything. Dave and Neal got a nice cut of that,” Tucker says. “But that’s OK.”

After Chappelle notoriously ended the show for personal reasons (“I think he just wanted to be in control of his work,” Tucker says), leaving at least $50 million on the table, Tucker was unemployed again. But Brennan put in a good word for him at “SNL” and Tucker was hired six months later.

Honda - Comedy Central - Chappelle s Show - Season 2 - I Know Black People

"Axe not what your country can do for you."

Those white suburban kids yelling, "Fa sheez, yo" could be running the Department of the Interior in a few years. From CNN's full transcript of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's speech to the NAACP this weekend:

In the 1961, it's been all over the Internet now, John Kennedy could stand at the inauguration in January and say, "ask not what your country can do for you, it's rather what you can do for your country." How do you spell "esk"? Nobody ever said to John Kennedy that's not English "esk". Only to a black child would they say you speak bad English. Kennedy got killed. Johnson stepped up to the podium and love feel, we just left love feel. And Johnson, said my fellow Americans. How do you spell fellow? How do you spell American? Nobody says to Johnson you speak bad English.

Ed Kennedy, today, those of you in the Congress, you know Kilpatrick. You know, Ed Kennedy today cannot pronounce cluster consonants. Very few people from Boston can. They pronounce park like it's p-o-c-k. Where did you "pock" the car? They pronounce f-o-r-t like it's f-o-u-g-h-t. We fought a good battle. And nobody says to a Kennedy you speak bad English. Only to a black child was that said.

That section of Wright's speech alone got him a Haterade shower from the morning yokels at MSNBC's Morning Joe. While honoring a court order to stay one hundred meters away from an elementary school yard, Tucker Carlson commented on the above section, "What a mediocrity! I mean, that's the embarrassing thing here. It's not just that he's anti-white and anti-American, all the things that have gotten so much publicity!"

So fine. Let's not give Wright any more pub and street cred. If you want to read a great mind write on how whites have managed to butcher the English language, but still remain successful in politics, pick up a copy of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder by Mark Crispin Miller. Or watch the Bill Moyers interview with Jeremiah Wright, and start a drinking game everytime Moyers butchers the word "Washington" with "Worshington." And if you drink that malt liquor you'll get fucked up quicker.

Note: There was a clip from BLACK AND WHITE which would have illustrated this whole blog entry perfectly, but it got botched. Instead, think that some of this fear of "Black English" and the dismissal of white folks in power butchering the language in terms of the video below:

White Kids witih "Black" names

It's not that it has been a slow news day or weekend (more on that tomorrow). But a reader and fellow blogger sent this in and it is cool enough to pass on. This piece is a journal entry from a blogger named "Daisy" on her experiences as a white girl with a black name. While "Daisy" is her screen moniker she claims that her birth name would cause her to be outed pretty easily as a white girl.

Here's her cool ending. The whole part is listed at her site:

:: At a retail location, a white male sales rep asked who was purchasing the books for a display, which was my job: _______ is, he was told. He blanched, shook his head adamantly and had something of a fit. He needed someone who knew about READING.

:: Employees are attending a seminar and a list of attendees' names given over the phone, to reserve seating . Wait, WHAT'S that name, again, who? "Has she finished high school?" (Everyone must finish high school to have the job in the first place, so why this question?)

:: "That's the worst name I ever heard, unless you're black, and you ain't!"

:: "Did your mom expect you to be black, or wasn't she sure who your daddy was?"

:: Lots of canceled dates, due to my name. Lots of changed invitations. And these were (white) guys my friends wanted me to meet, fellas they assured me were nice. I would invariably hear that the guy snorted derisively and/or initially freaked out: "I'm not going out with ______!!!" --until informed that I was blond and pale. Then he would.

But then, I wouldn't.

Various factors have influenced my politics. My mother was an EEOC representative and disability activist. She believed all people should be treated equally, and she lived her politics. And somewhere along the line, she gave me a black name, which has helped to guide my life. I have been forced, even against my will, to identify with a despised people.

"I know, I gave you a black name! I still thought I made it up," she told me, some time before her final illness.

"But it's been GOOD FOR YOU!" she announced. And then she smiled, satisfied.

It has been.

Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness week. Part five.

Rather than end the weekend with a radical deconstruction of whiteness and pop culture images, here's some funny stuff.  Vera and Gordon examine Finnian's Rainbow in depth in the book for the examples of Irish and black harmony in the South, magical transformations of white folk into blacks, and sexism.  But this scene involving a white man showing an educated black man how to "act like" black people is hilarious.  It is on some Chapelle Show level shit:

Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness week. Part four.

Today's clip and excerpt are going to be the only examples this week that spoil the ending for the movie.  Losing Isaiah concerns a black mother (Halle Berry) going to court to get back custody of a child she thought was dead, but he later grows up to be the PeoplePC kid  Jessica Lange plays the white adopted mother.  The description from Vera and Gordon makes a nice connection from the plot and the assumptions and how narratives of black women caring for white children play out:

The film is about the deep love of a white family for a black child.  At the end, the overjoyed Isaiah runs toward Margaret's arms, yelling, "Mommy!" proving who is the real mother.  Whereas the white American audience takes it for granted that Mammy [from Gone with the Wind] would nurture a white child as if she were her own, it is impressed when the reverse happens and a white person adopts a black child.  And Margaret seems even more saintly because she willingly adopts a crack baby who has neurological problems and learning disabilities.  In addition, Margaret has all the middle class virtues:  she is a professional with a stable home and a family who has already successfully raised a teenaage daughter.  Khaila is a crack whore, the kind of problem social workers like Margaret deals with.

[The movie] is an extreme case; very few adoptions are of crack babies abandoned in a garbage dump by prostitutes.  Khaila did not have to be a drug-addicted prostitute.  Suppose she were simply any young woman, of whatever race, who put up her baby for adoption because she was unmarried, without resources, and hoping for a better life for her child?...The movie is falsely presented as a question of "political correctness" concerning race, when it is really about the respective rights of birth mothers versus adoptive mothers.

Unfortunately, this movie, which seems at first so sensitive and unbiased, proves to be another sincere fiction of the white self in which a white woman is the better mother for a black child.  It is as if Scarlett or Lola Meredith adopted Mammy's or Annie's baby.

Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness week. Part three.

James Baldwin makes a great argument about about Guess Who's Coming To Dinner in The Price of the Ticket.  To paraphrase:  only Hollywood (and White America) could dream up a movie where a world famous, handsome, black prodigy (played by Sidney Poitier of all people) has to ask permission to marry an unemployed, untalented, and naive white woman.  Keeping Up With the Kardashians could have a great wedding episode next season just copying this formula.

Drayton's speech is one that is often repeated in the history of the history of American film:  it is the speech of the white liberal messiah coming to the rescue...

By giving Drayton the last word, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner legitimates white privilege.  The movie offers impassioned speeches about the generational differences and the glory of love but only tame platitudes about race.  The ostensible project of the film--to increase tolerance--is paradoxically only possible as it pays homage to white privilege, which is the unacknowledged root cause of the problem it seeks to overcome.  Guess Who's Coming to Dinner thus reverses its intended consequences.  It turns into a film about a crisis in the white patriarchy successfully resolved.  Racial differences can be tolerated, it implies, so long as white privilege is never brought into question.

Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness week. Part two.

Amistad, or "The Fundamental Goodness of White Institutions."

This is a highly patriarchal movie about the American judiciary.  There are no female speaking parts, except for the infantile queen of Spain, who is ridiculed as a prepubescent girl who plays with dolls.  Thus, the movie's dramatic tension is simply about which white patriarchal system will prevail...

As Simon Schama notes, "When Jefferson duly appears (in bust form), we are evidently not meant to think of the unrepentant Virginia slaveholder."  The movie's unintended irony lies in the fact, never mentioned, that, with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, these founding fathers owned slaves, supported slavery, or believed blacks were inferior to whites. 

John Adams, American president and father of John Quincy Adams, although not a proponent of slavery, nevertheless firmly believed in white supremacy.  Adams said of the British in 1765, before the Revolutionary War:  "We won't be their Negroes."  Adams insisted that Providence had never intended the American colonists "for Negroes...and therefore never intended us for slaves...I say we are as handsome as old English folks, and so should be as free."

...[T]he fear of the anger of the [slave] rebellion is exorcised through the (white) legal institutions of the state.  The movie exalts the goodness of the law and the reliability of white American civilization.  In Amistad, as in Glory, "the redemption of the white characters (as well as American Founding Fathers and political institutions) stands in, through an act of identification, for the redemption of the audience"--that is, of course, for a white American audience, because minority audiences may see the film differently.

Spielberg did not romanticize slavery, but showed the violence and pain on which it rested and the rage it aroused among the enslaved.  And filmgoers should be indebted to him for that.  Nevertheless, he chose to romanticize the institutions that made it legal and possible for slavery to exist.  Amistad, writes one critic, "glorifies the redemptive power of American justice with the reverence verging on religious zeal."

Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness week. Part one.

All entries this week will come from a fantastic book entitled Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. This 2003 book examines multiple ways in which mainstream Hollywood films (from box office blockbusters to Oscar winners) have manufactured the "white self"--especially in regards to the ways that White Americans save blacks, Native Americans, Asians, and space aliens from their problems.

You can skim some selections over at Goolge Books and each entry this week will come with an enclosed Youtube clip of the film in question. First up is To Kill a Mockingbird where a white ("ni**er lover") lawyer (Atticus) defends a black man (Tom) falsely accused of rape in the South during the Great Depression:

"The film reveals Atticus to be principled, dignified, and noble, but powerless.  When Atticus stands guard outside the jail during the night to protect Tom from a lynch mob, it is instead Scout who saves Tom...Atticus cannot successfully defend Tom in the courtroom either, because Tom is found guilty and then killed (supposedly while attempting to escape), and he cannot defend his children against [the "rape" victim's father] Ewell; instead [neighbor] Boo saves them.

So Atticus is actually a failed white messiah, but the film applauds him for his integrity.  In a crucial scene, after Tom is found guilty by the all-white jury, the blacks in the balcony stand up to honor Atticus and the black minister tells Scout, "Miss Jean Louis, stand up.  Your father's passing."  Atticus does not speak to them, maintaining his distance.  The blacks in the film are all powerless victims, as docile and dependent on white people as Tom Robinson.  A critic writes, "The scene here is a white fantasy of black behavior, in which the black community pays homage to the failed but noble efforts of a liberal white southerner." 

To Kill a Mockingbird, for all its good intentions, is another narcissistic fantasy about the white self congratulating itself for overcoming racism, at the same time that it turns blacks into passive, secondary characters."

"There's 41 reasons to blast back / No one, followed Diallo to the grave...fade to black."

Fuck it, no rhyme or reason on this one.  Just that people need to think more about Amado Diallou.  And even with rappers like DMX, Common, Pharaohe Monch, Talib Kweli, and Dead Prez givin' the man shoutouts in their tracks, Michael Moore brings the shit home to white cops in this video from a few years back. 

"Oh! Yeah, right! 'White oppression.' I'm sure history really backs that up!"

Twelve minutes of a space alien analyzing whiteness from back in the day. Mork and Mindy never did this shit!