I cannot believe that I live in an America where there are people who don’t know LeVar Burton. He’s only the man who taught every child born during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s how to read through the miraculous gift of the PBS show Reading Rainbow! Can anyone else say that?
As if teaching the wold to read weren’t enough, Burton also found time to be the young Kunta Kinte in the ABC television miniseries Roots; and if all of that wasn’t enough, he played Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In short, Burton is not only the physical representation of past black struggle; he was also the physical manifestation of black future. He was on the USS Enterprise, for God’s sake. Oh, and when he wasn’t being a slave or wearing super-cool fucking glasses on a goddamn spaceship, he was busy teaching black kids how to read.
So it’s not only disheartening that Trump voters would confuse a black national treasure with LaVar Ball, the loudmouthed dad of three basketball prodigies; it’s disingenuous. I know good and goddamn well that those voters know who the hell LeVar Burton is because all 100 percent of them watched Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It was Ball, not Burton, who has refused to thank President Satan von FrostyHorns for releasing his son LiAngelo, and two other UCLA basketball players, after a reported shoplifting spree in China.
Nevertheless, Burton, aka Black God’s softest angel wings, was inundated with toothless tweets that smelled of Budweiser beer and race car tires.
On behalf of LeVar Burton and his legacy, I demand a damn apology! And we don’t all look alike—I don’t care how many famous black people Chadwick Boseman plays. (Seriously, he’s been James Brown, Jackie Robinson and Thurgood Marshall; in what America do any of those people even remotely look alike?)