Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza thinks Trayvon Martin is a punchline.
D’Souza, author of several books including one blaming liberals for the September 11th terrorist attacks and one surmising that Barack Obama’s overriding ideology is not center-left liberalism but “Kenyan Anti-Colonialism,” decided to share his Thanksgiving thoughts on his Twitter account on Tuesday:
Although the account is not verified, it is the one linked on D’Souza’s official Facebook page which is promoted on his official website. (The tweet was deleted later in the day.)
The joke has three premises, the first being that America wouldn’t be burdened with Obama if someone had shot and killed him when he was a teenager, and the second is that dead black kids are hilarious.
Yet the joke proves a little too much, because the third premise of the joke is that black males are essentially interchangeable. And that implicitly acknowledges the president’s point in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict, that black people regardless of class or status can be subject to racial profiling. In its own sick way, it also acknowledges the unlimited potential of a person whose life was cut short before they really had a chance to live it.
There’s probably not a lot that supporters and opponents of Barack Obama can agree on, but not turning a dead teenager into the punchline of a joke is the sort of basic human decency anyone can aspire to. It appears to be beyond D’Souza.
Adam Serwer