Santa Claus: Still White
16th December 2013
Jim Goad has some fun with the usual suspects.
Aisha is a blogger for slate.com. She shares a first name with the girl who was married to Muhammad at age six and consummated their marriage at the unripened age of nine—while Ol’ Mo was 53—but I didn’t see this fact mentioned in the article that set off a diarrheal blast of news coverage last week.
Of course not. It’s not polite to think about, much less make fun of, the names that black parents give their daughters.
The essay was called “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore,” and forgive me if I think it’s a wee bit uppity for Aisha to presume she has the authority to make such declarations. Aisha writes of the shame and pain and confusion and heartache she’d experience every holiday season when she walked out into the Scary Big White World and was ruthlessly confronted with “pale” Santas who had “skin as pink as bubble gum.” Aisha failed to note that if she were still living in her ancestral homeland, she likely wouldn’t be concerned with such trifles. Back in those non-wintry climes, she might even know what horseflies taste like.
Oops – there’s that word (‘uppity’). You can apply that to white people, and white people only. For shame.
Still, I find it incumbent upon myself to apologize for some of my brethren who joked that if Santa Claus was black, he’d be breaking into houses with an empty bag and leaving with it full. That so-called “joke” was not funny, nor was it appropriate in these very, very, very sensitive times of change and progress.
As with most jokes, the reason it’s funny is because it has a germ of truth.