{"id":50507,"date":"2016-12-11T16:22:29","date_gmt":"2016-12-11T16:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50507"},"modified":"2016-12-11T16:22:29","modified_gmt":"2016-12-11T16:22:29","slug":"trevor-noah-still-doesnt-get-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50507","title":{"rendered":"Trevor Noah Still Doesn\u2019t Get\u00a0It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trevor Noah Still Doesn\u2019t Get\u00a0It<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

BuzzFeed<\/a>
\n2016-12-06<\/p>\n

Tomi Obaro<\/strong><\/a>, BuzzFeed News Reporter<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nTrevor Noah<\/a> (Paul Zimmerman \/ Getty Images)<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

The Daily Show<\/a> host and biracial South African comic\u2019s recent comments suggest a profound misunderstanding of the way racism works in America.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s many assumptions<\/strong> I\u2019ve made about America<\/a> that I\u2019ve realized were wrong,\u201d said Trevor Noah<\/a> toward the beginning of his 2013 stand-up special, African in America<\/em>. Slightly heavier than he is now and sporting a leather jacket and baggy jeans, this was Trevor Noah before he became the third host of Comedy Central\u2019s<\/a> The Daily Show<\/em><\/a> and, by extension, the latest purveyor of a pervasive, noxious type of moderate liberalism.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor one,\u201d Noah said in the special, \u201cI thought people spoke English here.\u201d He paused, allowing for a few bouts of laughter. Then he flashed a smile. \u201cFar from it. It\u2019s just what Americans have done with the language you guys have, just, wow. You\u2019ve done something, you\u2019ve put 22\u2019s on the English language. It\u2019s got rims \u2014 it\u2019s pimp my language.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then Noah launched into an anecdote about meeting a woman who wanted him to look at something. \u201cShe was like\u201d \u2014 here Noah began wagging his head from side to side \u2014 \u201cOh my god, look over thurr!\u201d he exclaimed, using African-American vernacular. It was a cringeworthy moment, indicative of a troubling reflexive tendency toward anti-blackness that Noah often seems blithely unaware of. And although he has moved away from this sort of overtly racist humor, his recent work as host of The Daily Show<\/em> has shown that Noah still doesn\u2019t quite grasp the reality \u2014 the frustration, the difficulty, the literally life-and-death stakes \u2014 of the black American experience…<\/p>\n

…Trevor Noah\u2019s American<\/strong> breakthrough happened rapidly. He had appeared on Jon Stewart\u2019s<\/a> Daily Show<\/em> only three times before he was tapped to replace him in March 2015. Before Noah even began the job, he was roundly chastised for some old, unfunny tweets about fat women and Jews, among others. But Noah was quick to put those things behind him: \u201cTo reduce my views to a handful of jokes that didn\u2019t land is not a true reflection of my character, nor my evolution as a comedian,\u201d he tweeted<\/a> later that month. Instead, he decided to embrace his perspective as an outsider. As the biracial child of a Xhosa<\/a> mother and a Swiss-German father, he occupied a liminal space in his home country. \u201cI\u2019ve lived a life where I\u2019ve never really fit in anywhere,\u201d he told an interviewer in a 2011 documentary about his life, Born to Walk<\/em>. And so his foreignness and his biracial identity became the primary lens through which he would approach his comedy in America…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trevor Noah Still Doesn\u2019t Get\u00a0It BuzzFeed 2016-12-06 Tomi Obaro, BuzzFeed News Reporter Trevor Noah (Paul Zimmerman \/ Getty Images) The Daily Show host and biracial South African comic\u2019s recent comments suggest a profound misunderstanding of the way racism works in America. \u201cThere\u2019s many assumptions I\u2019ve made about America that I\u2019ve realized were wrong,\u201d said Trevor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,8,23674,20],"tags":[13345,19769,25666,15219],"class_list":["post-50507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-buzzfeed","tag-the-daily-show","tag-tomi-obaro","tag-trevor-noah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50507"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50508,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50507\/revisions\/50508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}