There’s more. The clown has been fired. The president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association has stepped down. The Missouri State Fair is forcing clowns to undergo sensitivity training. The NAACP wants a Justice Department investigation into the clown act as a hate crime. And a Texas congressman has invited the clown to come on down.
It seems impossible to take this seriously, yet seriously we must take it. The clown act was offensive for one reason only: The president is black. No peep would have been made otherwise. But therein lies a difference and a distinction that deserves our scrutiny.
It’s the job of clowns to poke the precious and touch the untouchable. They are inherently rude, irreverent, insulting, insensitive and sometimes salacious. Presidents, obviously, are fair game and every modern president’s face has been made into a mask.
Still. There’s something wrong with this clown act. It isn’t a hate crime, but it is something we need to wrap our minds around. First, let’s correct a popular mischaracterization. Wearing an Obama mask is not tantamount to “blackface,” which is implicitly racist. When the president’s face is “black,” then the president’s mask is necessarily “black.”
Unless, apparently, the person wearing the mask is white, as was the rodeo clown.
Question: If a black person wears a George W. Bush mask, is he racist? The next logical question answers the first: What if the clown wears a Bush mask at an event attended primarily by blacks and invites the crowd to cheer for the bulls?
This unlikely event would feel offensive for the same reasons. The rodeo audience was mostly white and the masked man in the ring was depicting a black man. This changes everything.
Just as N-jokes are no longer funny to almost anyone, placing a black man in the arena like an unarmed gladiator isn’t amusing. As much as we aspire to racial harmony, we have centuries of history to overcome, including the mob-inspired lynching of black men, and this is what so many saw in the clown skit.
I am the last person who would suggest that irreverence be censored or punished — or clowns be sensitized. The excessively reverent are far scarier than those who would die laughing.
But a civil society should find reprehensible even mock violence against a president, especially one who belongs to a minority that was once targeted for state-sanctioned violence.
I doubt the clown was motivated by racial hatred. I doubt President Obama much cared, except for how his daughters might feel. I even give the benefit of the doubt to those who cheered the bulls as being inspired by political rather than racial animus.
And, yes, reaction has been overblown to the point of silliness, but there are lessons, nonetheless. We could stand to tone down our political expression for the sake of all our daughters and sons, who bear witness to these events and must make sense of their world. Perhaps more to the point, we might try to take ourselves more lightly.
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