White people love to hear Black people provide the same criticism of other Blacks’ that they espouse. Everyone understands, regardless of the issue, really, that there is a kind of automatic credibility that exists when a member of a group adversely affected by some policy or action espouses the same or similar arguments as the group responsible for imposing the adverse policy or action. The imposing/oppressor group members know that whatever they say is automatically suspect and easily dismissed as self-serving; but when the affected/oppressed group member makes the same statements, well, then the imposing/oppressor group member is, in essence, vindicated. It is so transparent.
This is why conservative Black people (or any Black person who disparages our people) are so beloved by white people of all political stripes, and are so enthusiastically given fora to broadcast their self-loathing. The brilliant attorney and law professor Derrick Bell touches on this phenomenon in the Third Rule of his Rules of Racial Standing, a chapter from his book “Faces at the Bottom of the Well.” Professor Bell posits that Blacks’ views on racism and their experiences related thereto are generally discounted—the exception is “the black person who publicly disparages or criticizes other blacks who are speaking or acting in ways that upset whites. Instantly, such statements are granted ‘enhanced standing’ even when the speaker has no special expertise or experience in the subject he or she is criticizing.”
Benjamin Watson’s legitimizing of owners’ racist considerations regarding Kaepernick’s protest as a Black man and football player is the latest example of his previous attempts to position himself as Not One of Those Angry Negroes,™ but a man who is “objective” and “sees both sides.” As if there are two sides to the story of centuries of horrific, destructive, murderous, dehumanizing, rapacious, institutionalized and systemic racism on the one hand, and efforts to destroy racism’s continued proliferation and effects on its victims on the other.
Edit: Looks like Mr. Watson may be coming around….
