Whoa there, Chris Cuomo, slow down—your ignorance is showing. On Thursday the CNN anchor was on Sirius XM’s POTUS channel and was trying to make a connection regarding what journalists feel when they hear the term “fake news.”
As reported by The Hill, the host of CNN’s New Day said:
I see being called “fake news” as the equivalent of the n-word for journalists.
It is an ugly insult, and you had better be right if you’re going to charge a journalist with lying on purpose. The president was not right here, and he’s not been right in the past.
Umm, dafuq?
Out of all the places Cuomo could’ve gone with this, he drags the n-word into his conversation?
White people, seriously. It’s Black History Month, for Christ’s sake. I can’t say this plainly enough: Please, pretty please, with Frederick Douglass on top, stop equating the struggle that black people have gone through to any first world problems you’re having. Your struggle, no matter how intense, is nothing like ours.
This isn’t Cuomo’s first time being off pitch on race; in fact, he considered the idea of calling President Donald Trump racist “provocative,” even though his guest was a New York Times reporter who’d researched Trump’s 45-year history of racist practices. In another instance, Cuomo found the “angry tone” of Reza Aslan, a Muslim professor who challenged CNN hosts on the overgeneralization that all Muslims were somehow violent, to be an example of why people fear Muslims.
But let’s get back to this dude here: Chris Cuomo can compare journalists’ assignments being called “fake news” to blacks being called nigger when he can show me that PBS documentary where millions of journalists were forced to work for free for 400 years and got lynched for daring to go to the White House press dinner.
The real is this: Cuomo was tight because the president came for him after an interview he’d done with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in which, the president claimed, Cuomo didn’t press Blumenthal on charges that he lied about his service in Vietnam. Tweeted Trump:
Chris Cuomo, in his interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave ‘service’ in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!
Cuomo reaired the portion of the interview showing that it was the topic of one of his first questions, and noted that the president was off again with his position on journalists.
“Really, [it’s] the first point I made in the interview,” Cuomo said on the Sirius XM show. “The president, with all due respect, is once again off on the facts. And that’s not something that any of us have any desire to say on a regular basis, but it keeps being true.”
So, battle Trump there. Say that he’s a liar; hell, call him a fake president, since we all suspect that Steve Bannon is really the one tweeting from his account and handing the president his bottle and Binky. But whatever you do, stop dragging us into your fight. Black people don’t have anything to do with the fake-news charge. In fact, because of the lack of diversity in news, it is arguably the one thing black people can’t be blamed for.
The president is taking shots against you, so shoot back. You don’t need us to make your point. You didn’t need to throw around anything that African Americans have gone through or will go through to fight your battle.
In fact, if you are ever confused, I will leave you a list of things you can never say your struggle is like:
- slavery
- racism
- systematic oppression
- police violence
- anything that we’ve ever gone through in the history of anything
Fight your own fights. The struggle that we face daily isn’t here for you to use at your will. You don’t get to pick through the murky history of American blackness to see what suits you.
And Cuomo knows this; in fact, he took to Twitter shortly afterward to apologize:
The president is maddening, and I get it. He says anything he wants to without facts, but black facts aren’t pawns to be used in a white fight; and as much as it hurts America, the fake-news charge is a white fight, so let’s keep it that way.