Lloyd Grove at the Daily Beast lambastes Matt Drudge, who splashed the n-word across his Drudge Report earlier this week in a link to a review of director Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film Django Unchained, about a freed slave.
Other than going for shock and awe, Drudge's purpose wasn't entirely clear, although he linked his repetitively epithetic headline to a film review of Quentin Tarantino's latest violent mockudrama, Django Unchained, about a mid-19th Century former slave (played by Jamie Foxx) who wreaks gory vengeance on the evil white masters of Dixie. Sort of Inglourious Basterds transferred from World War II Europe to the Old South.
Drudge, as usual, declined to comment on his incendiary exhibition — leaving tweeters, bloggers and pundits to boil in their own stew of outrage and confusion.
"I thought it was a really dumb headline, and without any context it becomes a really dumb conversation," said cultural critic Touré, cohost of MSNBC's The Cycle and author of the recent book Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?. "What is being said here? Did Quentin Tarantino go on some kind of Michael Richards rage thing where he cursed out some black people? No, not at all."
Touré, a Tarantino fan who says it makes perfect sense that the n-word would be uttered repeatedly in a film set in the pre-Civil War South, attributes Drudge's attention-getting headline to just that — a bid for attention.
Read more at the Daily Beast.