Louisiana state Senator Elbert Guillory–who became the first black Republican senator in Louisiana since Reconstruction upon switching parties in 2013–has released a YouTube video in which he drops a series of racial epithets, including the N-word, to open up what he calls a dialogue on race.
In Obama’s age of political correctness, Guillory’s good humored video, “Let’s Talk about Race” is shocking in both its defiance of P.C. conventions and its theme of colorblindness. The video’s description says it “addresses the need for Americans to discuss race relations in the modern era.”
Guillory appears in the video both as himself and as a number of characters, using the N-word over a dozen times and showing its use in a variety of contexts, including affection, derision, and tradition. Black actors also appear in the video.
Guillory then goes on to use a slew of terms for various races and religions, the message being: let’s talk about race and not feign shock at mere words when real problems exist.
Guillory’s bold video is reminiscent of the 1950s shock comic Lenny Bruce, who felt the best way to end racism was not censorship, but, as someone once commented, by showing how “we use words–or [don’t use] words–and social niceties to hide the problems and hypocrisies in our society,” and made a point about Bruce that applies equally to Guillory’s video:
In a brilliant leap, Bruce was attacking a couple of our fallacies at once. First, the pleasant liberal notion that by eliminating unpleasant racial and ethnic references from our vocabulary that we’re eliminating bigotry. Worse, by casting these words beyond the linguistic pale, we’re creating forbidden fruit, giving these awful words added punch, undermining the very intent of setting them proscribing their use.
As the media and Democrat politicans champion Black Lives Matter at the same time murder rates are spiking for young black men killed by other young black men, hypocrisies abound. Elbert Guillory is facing them–head on.