Others, including The Root’s staff writer Michael Harriot, have already written about the support Sean Hannity received after some of his sponsors cut ties with him for having alleged child molester Roy Moore on his show to explain his tendency to date teens. We know, already, that this support at all costs is hypocritical. And disgusting. And shameless. And craven. And, unfortunately, relentless, since reason and fact and the supporters’ own, actual, deaths just don’t seem to matter, either.
But can we take a moment to step back and acknowledge how gotdamn fucking weird it is, too? Deciding, as a response to Keurig’s decision to stop airing ads on Hannity’s Fox News show—a decision the company eventually rescinded, but whatever—to go into your kitchen and smash your coffee maker to smithereens and then post it to the internet is a weird-ass thing to do!
The only reasons I can think of to destroy an expensive coffee-making apparatus in your own home are:
1. if it was being used, by an ambitious and resourceful killer, to bludgeon you to death, and you needed to break it to save your own life; or, perhaps,
2. if it grew sentient and decided to stop making coffee and just spent the entire day on your couch watching Vice Principal reruns on HBO On Demand.
Then, and only then, would I think, “You know what? This Keurig 2.0 K575 Plus Brewing System maybe needs to die.” But even then, I wouldn’t put its death on the internet, because no one would believe my story about the sentient, Walton Goggins-obsessed coffee maker that needed to be executed. If I did do it, people would see that and think, “Something is wrong with Damon, I think,” and they’d start a group-text thread about what might be troubling me. Perhaps I’d even get an Edible Arrangement in the mail this week with a card saying, “Just thinking about you, bro. Hang in there.” And I hate coffee!
But white people do shit like this all of the damn time, and no one really steps back to comment on how fucking weird it is because I guess we just associate extra-super-duper whiteness with weirdness. Like the time, for instance, when white people went ballistic on french fries—french fries!—because France decided that the Iraq War was a shitty idea. They even started calling them “freedom fries”—Freedom. Fries.—which, again, is weird as fuck! What the hell did a french fry ever do to them, besides be delicious and surprisingly good with Dijon mustard?
There’s also the practice of burning the jerseys of professional athletes who decide to switch teams. We all recognize the unambiguous racial subtext of these white fans performing this act when disappointed by black players, but what about the abject weirdness of going into your closet and grabbing a Kevin Durant jersey and then going to your deck and grabbing some lighter fluid, and then going to your backyard to set it on fire and posting your Durant bonfire on the internet?
If you are my friend and I call you up and say, “Hey, friend, what’s going on?” and you say, “I’m in my backyard filming the tiny flames emitting from the remnants of that $450 LeBron jersey I bought three years ago. Do you want to come through?” I am going to refuse your request to come over, and I am going to call you an ambulance just in case you’re having a stroke.
White people are so weird that there’s an entire subgenre of black-people discourse called “white-people shit” where we discuss, among ourselves, weird-ass shit that white people do. It’s pretty much both a support group and a perpetual verifier, because some of this shit is so weird that we believe no one would believe us unless other people witnessed and/or experienced it, too.
It even affects how we consume the news. We immediately place weird-ass things that happen into the “white-people shit” subcategory without knowing anything about those things other than the headline. Y’all are so weird—and so known for this weirdness—that we racially profile the news.
I guess I should be happy, at least, that it was Keurig that decided to pull its advertisements and not Sesame Street. I’ve grown quite attached to Elmo, since my daughter is quite attached to him, too, and I don’t know if I’d be able to deal with YouTubed Elmo decapitations. Which seems far-fetched now, but if Elmo came out and tweeted #BlackLivesMatter tomorrow, I wouldn’t put it past them.
#SaveElmosHead.